Mourning of the Magicians

Long in the shadows of the great European powers, the United States emerged after WWII to command the world’s greatest economic engine centered around her merchants of steel, oil and gunpowder, aka the military-industrial complex.

The smoke of WWI had barely cleared before the Morgan-Rockefeller-DuPont axis began fomenting an even bigger boom-and-bang. Right after the “war to end all wars,” IG Farben was manifested through John Foster Dulles’ magic wand (and some massive Wall Street loans). The company was designed as a European mirror of Standard Oil, which was owned by Dulles’ cousin by marriage, David Rockefeller.

Farben swiftly transformed into the dominant cartel in Europe, as well as Hitler’s biggest booster. Perhaps best remembered for its creation of a petrochemical poison known as Zyklon B (designed originally for insect infestations, and later deployed to exterminate “useless eaters,” i.e. Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, disabled), Farben conducted business with Standard Oil throughout the hostilities.

Although the corporation was split into pieces after the war (much like Standard Oil was divided by anti-trust laws), one of Farben’s divisions now owns Monsanto, leading to speculation on who won the peace.

Elements of the Nazi empire were secretly imported into the USA to construct NASA and the CIA, among other projects. NASA was built on the back of German rocket science and the CIA was built on the back of the Gestapo science, some of which seems to have involved forbidden substances and mass mind control. Despite promises never to engage in operations on native soil, the CIA immediately corrupted our media, banking system and major universities, while launching a mind-control program known as MK/Ultra that mixed hypnosis with LSD in the hopes of creating robot slaves.

In 1963, the CIA asserted their dominance by assassinating President John F. Kennedy while deploying Nazi and MK/Ultra assets during the planning, execution and cover-up. There are numerous dirty secrets held close to the vest, but JFK’s murder remains the CIA’s most worrisome secret, and through the decades they’ve launched a thousand memes to divide, misdirect and confuse anyone attempting to penetrate the truth. This blog concerns one of those memes, a spoof religion called Discordianism.

Meet the founder: Gregory Hill. Aside aside from the name, however, virtually nothing is known and it took decades for the name to emerge because he was known only as Malaclypse the Younger. (And who knows if Greg Hill is a real name anyway.) However, we do know some details on Hill’s sidekick and co-conspirator, Kerry Thornley, who was in boot camp with Lee Harvey Oswald. In hindsight it seems possible Hill’s real bio might contain some link to military intelligence, just as Thornley and Oswald may have been subjected to MK/Ultra experiments. The duo were forever entwined after the assassination. Thornley helped concoct a clever brew of fact and fantasy to create the CIA’s original Tin Foil Hat Patrol, and spread a cloud of chaos over the case, one that has defined the spook-infested world of conspiracy theory. Thornley became an important witness for the Warren Commission, providing evidence Oswald was devoted to the communist cause. You see, it was very important a communist kill Kennedy.

You can tell by the photo Thornley was a flower child influenced by the Beats, Merry Pranksters and Maynard G. Krebs, among others. But after his Warren Commission testimony, he attended at a spook-infested summer camp in Colorado popular with the Koch family, co-founders of the conspiracy-mongering John Birch Society. And upon graduation of that program moved to California to become chummy with Johnny Roselli (one of JFK’s assassins.) Thornley then moved to Atlanta and commenced a long correspondence with Robert Anton Wilson during a time Wilson was letters editor of Playboy magazine, the first and perhaps only national magazine to interview DA Jim Garrison. Garrison was a rare public official with balls enough to go up against the CIA.

Wilson was mesmerized and soon heavily influenced by Thornley’s tales of secret societies secretly running the world, a cosmology that bore similarities to the suddenly popular Morning of the Magicians, a text published in France in 1960, but released in America in 1963.

One online reviewer sums the book up thusly: “Medieval alchemists producing atomic bombs and atomic fusion; the Nazi movement inspired by memory/dreams of Atlantis; the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside; the Moon, Mars and Jupiter and the stars are made of ice; and three Moons have crashed into Earth, producing great evolutionary jumps and de-evolutionary lapses, like “Gypsies, Negroes and Jews.”

Hill and Thornley wrote a similar opus for their goof religion published in the style of an underground fanzine, a confusing mix of parody rituals, little-known Illuminati facts tossed with horror fantasies plucked out of Edward Plunkett and H.P. Lovecraft, who’d invented terrifying tales of monstrous conspiracies at the beginning of the century. Horror fantasy held a magnetic attraction in the LSD-fueled Sixties, and the higher people got, the harder it became to discern facts from fantasies, especially when so many fantasies revolved around the JFK assassination. It seems possible counterintelligence realized the Kennedy assassination could best be concealed by wrapping it inside stories of magic powers and alien visitations to deceive the gullible and lead them into the rabbit holes.

Mae Brussell came from a wealthy family, graduated from Stanford and Berkeley, and her father was a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles. She purchased all volumes of the Warren Commission as soon as available and launched a career as a radio host examining holes in the official story. Her files on the subject became as large as Mary Ferrell’s. Later, her research appeared in Paul Krassner’s Realist, and attracted the attention of John Lennon, who donated money to help publish her book. Much of the work involved Operation Paperclip and the MK/Ultra and Nazi connections to Kennedy’s assassination.

In 1977, after publishing Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson was interviewed in Conspiracy Digest about the JFK assassination, the Illuminati, Aleister Crowley, UFOs and other issues. Brussell wrote a scathing response accusing Wilson, John Lilly and Timothy Leary of being CIA stooges leading the youth into a fake drug-addled utopian fantasy involving space travel. “Ask Leary or Wilson anything practical about today’s miseries and they change the subject,” she wrote.

Wilson responded by denying he was a CIA dupe, insisting he was “a high official of the agency since July 23, 1973.”

One of the primary precepts of Discordianism was never believe anything about anything, and Wilson never wavered from his roll as a Prankster-deceiver. In hindsight, however, most of the nonsense people believe today about the Illuminati has roots in his fantasy trilogy, and his work shows little evidence of scholarly research into the history of the Illuminati. Wilson believed the-eye-in-the-pyramid was an Illuminati invention and ridiculed the suggestion the society could have been a Jesuit penetration of freemasonry.

Actually that is certainly one of many valid possible explanations, not something to be ridiculed. According to Wilson, the Illuminati were “good guys” fighting against royalty and religion, and not some devious intelligence operation deploying ends-justify-the-means morality codes. Wilson introduced the idea that the number 23 was an Illuminati concept (it never was) and usually insisted the society had died out shortly after being founded. He believed Oswald shot Kennedy and Garrison’s investigation was a fraud.

Wilson’s biggest contribution to Discordianism was called Operation Mindfuck or OM, and involved disturbing a person’s reality matrix with some mindblowing conspiracy information and then trailing off into some make-believe maze of confusion. Life as zen koan wherein any sufficiently ambiguous answer works for any question whatsoever. If you ever got really high on psychedelics and had friends fuck with your head, you’ll recognize the sadistic underpinnings of Operation Mindfuck, and how it runs contrary to real investigations into conspiracies.

Within a few years, however, Antony Sutton published a factual book revealing how Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones deploys remarkably similar rituals as the original Illuminati, and the Bonesman have successfully penetrated the upper levels of the CIA, investment banks and military industrial complex. Prescott Bush was a Bonesman and also acted as Hitler’s banker on Wall Street to the point of being chastised for trading with the enemy after the war. The society was created prior to the Civil War by the cousin of the heir of the American opium cartel (Russell & Co.) after visiting Southern Germany, and based off a secret fraternity he’d been inducted into while there. After establishing Bones, he became the biggest financial backer of John Brown, the terrorist who sparked the Civil War’s armed confrontation. No, this is not some Operation Mindfuck going down, just some simple truths that most people have yet to digest.

Brussell, in the meantime, was not up on Sutton’s research. Instead she began making outrageous claims, connecting dots that probably didn’t connect, accusing almost every celebrity death of being orchestrated by the CIA for some nefarious purpose, much the same way every school shooting is instantly branded a fake event by today’s Tin Foil Hat Patrol. Brussell claimed there were immense assassination plots to derail youth culture and even claimed Charles Manson was a Manchurian Candidate under hypnotic control. That was one of her wildest theories, and one that may actually have been true.

However, when Krassner began checking out her evidence for a potential book on Manson, he claimed it didn’t add up. Krassner suffered a paranoid meltdown at his dentist’s office and soon departed the plains of conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, Karl Koch was the son of a right-wing publisher in Germany, and he began rebelling against his dad as a teen. Karl had an early interest in computers as well as a fascination with the Illuminatus! Trilogy, claiming to have read the book 30 times. Karl may have been Wilson’s biggest fan and the two met briefly at a hacker convention. Karl was especially taken with the magic number 23 and seems to have swallowed Wilson’s imaginative suggestion that George Washington could have been assassinated and replaced by Adam Weishaupt, something based solely on a slight resemblance between the two men and the fact the eye-in-the-triangle appears on US currency (even though Weishaupt never used that symbol). Of course it was all OM and Karl got mindfucked.

Despite operating with only a primitive Commodore 64, Karl successfully penetrated a number of military-industrial websites around the world and sold passwords and other information to the KGB to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, a connection established by his cocaine dealers. Most of the money he earned from hacking flowed back into the dealers’ hands. Karl descended into a paranoid cocaine-induced psychosis for a while. Meantime the German authorities offered up a hacker’s amnesty in order to crack the subculture and Karl took the offer, but was soon found in a forest, burnt to a crisp. Strangely, his death was ruled a suicide, but a more likely explanation is the drug dealers killed him in retaliation for going state’s evidence.

Karl died on May 23, 1989.

The men who killed Kennedy

Amos Eunis.

On November 22, almost all attention in Dealey Plaza was fixed on the President and First Lady as they rode slowly through the plaza in Dallas at under ten miles per hour. Only four claimed to have glimpsed a gunman in a window of the Texas School Book Depository, and not all agreed which window. But because this territory is so salted with spooks and rabbit holes, you never know whom to trust, if anyone. The youngest and most believable witness, however, was a 15-year-old named Amos Eunis who led the police at the scene to start searching the School Book Depository after seeing a man fire twice from its corner window.

Amos heard four shots that day, and was certain two had been fired by a bald-headed man in the southeast corner of the 6th floor. He saw a reflection off the head when the gunman leaned forward to take his second shot. The fact he could not identify any other characteristics may have saved Amos’s life for had he gotten a good look at the shooter’s face, he would have known it wasn’t Oswald, who was downstairs finishing his lunch. Many inconvenient witnesses died prematurely, the first wave right after the event and another when Garrison began his investigation.

“Mad Dog” Harvey.

Twenty-six years ago, when I began researching a cover story for High Times magazine on the assassination, the most illuminating book I discovered was Wilderness of Mirrors by David Martin, my first real look inside the CIA. The book revealed Bill Harvey and Johnny Roselli had been working with Ted Shackley and David Morales on a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, a project halted by the Kennedy brothers.

My immediate suspicion upon reading the book was that Harvey’s executive action project diverted to hit JFK after the President demoted Harvey, who had a purple hatred of both Kennedy brothers. When RFK suggested he could train some infiltrators on his estate, Harvey had snorted: “Train them as what?  Babysitters?” Harvey, on the other hand, was the CIA’s most gung-ho, boom-and-bang cowboy, an assassin with many notches already on his gun, and certainly dreamed of killing JFK. Harvey had a serious drinking problem and issues with rage. The CIA takes orders from the National Security Council, which is chaired by the President. But what if the council decides the president is a threat to national security? Could the council then deploy the CIA to remove him? Because apparently that’s what actually happened.

Harvey was in Italy running the Rome CIA station at the time, a post that deployed a corporate front named Permidex to cloak covert ops.

(Excerpted from Killing Kennedy: The Real Story.)

Kerry Wendell Thornley is a key to the JFK assassination

Intel manufactures “influencers” on both sides of any wedge issue simply because people are easily influenced. Wedge issues are the fulcrums deployed to divide and conquer. The influencer makes sure his side of the wedge flows into a managed dialectic. These games are always presented as a choice between two alternatives. If you’re looking for proof of intel penetration into the emerging sixties counterculture, and the manufacture of influencers, look no further than Kerry Thornley.

Thornley became a major New Age influencer despite a strict Mormon upbringing. In 1963, he invented Discordianism, which became the primary influence on the Church of the SubGenius and other counterculture alternative religions.

In 1959, however, Thornley was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan along with Lee Harvey Oswald. The base was a notorious site for MK/Ultra experiments deemed too controversial for US soil and it seems Oswald and Thornley could have gone through some behavior modifications as their lives became forever entwined. When Oswald departed to Russia posing as a defector offering up the U-2 secret, Thornley moved to New Orleans and began writing a novel based on Oswald titled The Idle Warriors.

Thornley was subpoenaed by the Warren Commission and a copy of his unpublished manuscript entered into the National Archives. He gave a highly detailed deposition establishing what a devoted Marxist Oswald was. It included the following exchange:

THORNLEY: [Oswald] had gotten me to read 1984 and this was one of his favorites.
JENNER. Tell me what 1984 was.
THORNLEY. This was a book about…it is a projection into the future, supposed to take place in 1984 in England under a complete police state. It is, I would say, an anti-utopian novel, by George Orwell, a criticism of English socialism and what it might lead to, based upon Orwell’s experiences with Communism and Nazism, his observations about a society .in which a mythical leader called Big Brother dominates everybody’s life. Where there are television cameras on every individual at all times watching his every act, where sex is practically outlawed, where the world is perpetually at war, three big police states constantly at war with one another, and where thought police keep every, all of the citizens in line. Oswald would often compare the Marine Corps with the system of government outlined in 1984.
JENNER. By way of protest against the Marine Corps?
THORNLEY. Yes; humorously, satirically. One day we were unloading, moving a radarscope off the truck and it slipped, and he said, “Be careful with Big Brother’s equipment.”

Because of Thornley’s appearance in front of the Warren Commission, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison made Thornley a target of his investigation. From Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins:

Thornley had told me that he returned from his summer in California by way of Mexico City. This happened to be very close to the time that the Warren Commission said Oswald was in Mexico. By November 1963, according to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment he rented from John Spencer. We located Spencer, who turned out to be a friend of Clay Shaw’s. As he described it, sometimes Spencer visited Shaw, the director of the International Trade Mart, and sometimes it was vice versa.

Several days after the assassination. Spencer told us, he came to his house and found Thornley gone. In Spencer’s mailbox was a note from Thornley saying, “I must leave. I am going to the Washington, D.C. area, probably Alexandria, Virginia. I will send you my address so that you can forward my mail.” Spencer said it was quite unexpected because Thornley had at least a week left in the month before his rent was due. He went to Thornley’s apartment, number “C”, and found that paper had been left over the entire floor, torn up into small pieces like confetti. Before being torn up, the paper had been watered down so that the ink was blurred, making it unreadable. After the assassination Thornley told Spencer he was going to be a rich man because of the coincidence of Oswald having been the subject of his book.
Thornley had wound up at Arlington, a Washington suburb, and had moved into Shirlington House, a first-class apartment building where he worked as doorman. Thornley stayed at Shirlington House for six months, until he testified before the Warren Commission. Oddly enough, his salary was less than the rent of his Shirlington House apartment.

In the mid-1970s when I was in the private practice of law, Thornley sent a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing, among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of “Nazi activity” in connection with President Kennedy’s murder. It was apparent that even though I no longer was D.A. Thornley wanted to assure me that he had not been involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Although it did not accord with reality, as I recalled it, the affidavit had, in retrospect, one interesting feature. Purely gratuitously, it mentioned how Thornley had left Washington following his Warren Commission testimony and ultimately returned to California, where he and John Roselli happened to become friends.

Actually, the first place Thornley visited after departing Washington was Robert LeFevre’s John-Birch-connected Freedom School in Colorado, where he joined soon-to-be very powerful Charles Koch. Eventually Thornley came clean on the JFK assassination and confessed he’d been drawn into the plot by E. Howard Hunt.

But we know now that Hunt was not the instigator or anything close. After David Morales offered him a role in the assassination, which Hunt turned down (according to his deathbed confession), James Angleton seems to have selected Hunt as the official agency rabbit-hole-backstop. First, Weberman falsely ID’s Hunt as one of the three tramps. Then Angleton leaks a memo implicating Hunt as being in Dallas that day. Meanwhile, a handwritten note from Oswald to a Mr. Hunt is sent anonymously to Penn Jones, a leading researcher in the field before Lane shoves him off the national stage. Soon, Lane will focus all his attention on Hunt, culminating in a widely-covered libel trial. But all this million dollar trial proved was that Hunt could have been in Dallas that day. And by shepherding all eyes on Hunt, the real culprits at JM/Wave (Shackley, Harvey, Morales) were able to waltz free.

But the Thornley saga didn’t end there, not even close. In 1975, Antony Sutton published National Suicide detailing massive covert assistance from Wall Street to Russia. He was kicked out of the prestigious Hoover Institute and cast academically adrift. The John Birch Society seized on Sutton’s work to prove a thesis that Rockefeller and Rothschild were secret Communists working to integrate Russia and the US into one entity to rule the world.  Interestingly, the leading polemicist for the Birchers, Revilo P. Oliver, was also called upon by the Warren Commission for a lengthy deposition, as was Mark Lane. It appears significant depositions might have been staged by CIA-connected spooks seeding rabbit holes and backstops.

While working as letters editor of Playboy, conspiracy researcher Robert Anton Wilson was inundated by Birch propaganda and decided to counter it by writing a satirical story about the Illuminati as if the society was an honest attempt to overthrow royalty and religion (and not some covert Jesuit plot to infect Freemasonry from within). Thornley immediately began corresponding with Wilson and worked his way into the pages of Playboy and eventually Discordianism became the foundation for Wilson’s trilogy, which began with a counterculture reporter’s investigation into the JFK assassination. Wilson’s fantasy, however well intended, served to make any Illuminati conspiracy less believable. Worse, it elevated Thornley to icon status instead of unmasking him as either a spook or MK/Ultra robot. Wilson’s book became launching pad for decades of nutty Illuminati conspiracies.

Meanwhile, despite the loss of academic credentials, Sutton soon published America’s Secret Establishment, revealing Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones was deploying remarkably similar rituals as the original Illuminati. He never claimed a continuous order, only that the Boner playbook had lifted significant concepts from Adam Weishaupt. Meanwhile, the Birchers kept pumping disinfo memes alleging the Rothschilds and Rockefellers were secret Communist agents plotting the integration of the US and Russia into one massive socialist state, the beginnings of the one-world government conspiracy rabbit hole.

There were five shots in Dallas

Eleven-year-old Mack White visited Dealey Plaza the day after JFK’s assassination with his father, a local newspaper editor who came equipped with a camera. When they arrived, Mack noticed two men standing on the Dal-Tex Building fire escape, one of whom was looking through a scoped rifle mounted on a tripod.

“Look,” Mack said to his father while pointing.

“I guess they’re detectives,” said his father. “They’re probably checking to see if there was another shooter.”

The idea of another shooter had not yet occurred to Mack. Later, he learned the two men could have been journalists using the gun as a prop for a photo of Elm Street that appeared the following week in the Saturday Evening Post. Or maybe they were something else entirely.

“In the years that followed, evidence emerged that there could have been a shooter in the Dal-Tex Building, as well as evidence for shooters all over the plaza, including the Grassy Knoll,” Mack wrote much later. Like many Americans, he remains haunted by the case.

The total number of shots is a great mystery, but it can be solved. The locations of the shooters can established at this point. Johnny Roselli was positioned in a storm drain inside the triple underpass and his only shot entered JFK’s throat.

There was a man with a rifle in the corner of the sixth floor window, but we know that man wasn’t Oswald, who was still eating lunch downstairs during the turkey shoot. There may be another shooter somewhere in the Dal-Tex Building, either on the roof or the fire escape, or deep inside some west-facing window behind a blind, or perhaps on the roof of the Depository. A shooter from the rear hit JFK in the back, and also Governor Connolly, and at least one rear shot missed everything and hit the curb, wounding James Tague. This means rear shots were fired a minimum of three times, while the other shooters seem to have only fired once. We know the kill shot came from the knoll, and it seems to have been the last, and adds up to a minimum of five shots. We just don’t know if all rear shots came from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. Because two rifles were discovered inside the Depository (a Carcano and a Mauser), it’s possible both could have been fired, one from the sniper’s nest, and the other from the window farthest east or perhaps even the roof, both of which would have offered better locations from which to fire into the plaza. My best guess is there were four snipers, and two of them had to be in the rear because Kennedy and Connolly were hit almost simultaneously by bullets that could not have been fired by the same bolt-action rifle.

According to Dave Powers, who was riding in the trailing vehicle, the first two came close together, followed by a several-second pause, and the unmistakable headshot that sounded like a watermelon exploding. Powers described a bang, bang…..bang pattern, while other witnesses heard the opposite: a bang…..bang, bang, with the last two coming very close together.

Murders leave immense telepathic disturbances in their wake. Although Jackie Kennedy reacted instinctively by moving to retrieve JFK’s skull fragment from the trunk where it landed, she had no memory of doing so when testifying before the Warren Commission. Yet there are multiple photos and films showing her reaching across the trunk. This is why the testimony of those nearest the scene is often somewhat unreliable.

There had to have been five distinct shots that day, but some overlapped and/or may have emanated from a weapon with a sound-suppressor. Most witnesses heard three shots, which meant two must have overlapped or been taken as a fire-cracker or motorcycle back-fire instead of a rifle shot. The difficulty is the pattern of the shots seems to vary depending on the witness’s location in the Plaza.

View from the Dal-Tex Building.

In 1977, a cartridge was discovered by an air conditioning mechanic on the roof of the Dal-Tex building with crimped edges suggesting it had been hand-loaded or used in conjunction with a sabot, something deployed to fire lower-caliber bullets from a higher-caliber weapon. Strangely, one of the Carcano shell casing found on the sixth floor had a crimp according to Roger Craig, the first policeman on the scene. The last Federal investigation (HSCA) determined in 1978 that four shots were fired, one that missed, one at Zapruder frame 224, one at Zapruder frame 313, immediately followed by the 4th shot. The Warren Report’s published FBI analysis of the bullet that wounded eyewitness James Tague indicated it originated from a weapon that did not fire full-metal jacket ammo; unlike the Carcano carbine found in the TSBD that only fired full-metal jacket bullets. This alone should have been enough evidence to prove a conspiracy.

In 1987, John Rademacher found a shell casing buried underground near the stockade fence in Dealey Plaza. Through a complex set of circumstances, this shell would soon be linked to a jailed and convicted assassin connected to the Chicago outfit named James Files, who claimed he was the grassy knoll gunman and had left his shell on the picket fence. Files also indicated he had a habit of biting his spent bullets (because he liked the taste of gun powder). And wouldn’t know you it, teeth marks were quickly found on the Rademacher cartridge.

Since there is such an intense effort to plant false evidence and false confessions into this story, it’s unlikely in my opinion Files is telling the truth, even though major parts of his story do correspond to something close to the truth. It’s far more likely the grassy knoll assassin fired once and never ejected the spent cartridge, much less put it between his teeth before setting it on top of the fence for all to see. The only shells left at the scene were the three intentionally planted on the sixth floor to incriminate Oswald. The main purpose of all these multiple fake confessions through the decades seems to be to engineer fakers into achieving widespread acceptance inside the research community before exposing them as frauds. Not only do these confessions put a cloud of mud in the investigative waters, they help brand the research community as conspiracy crackpots. I call these ops: “Time bombs salted in a rabbit hole.”

The JFK assassination film they never told you about

Everyone knows the story of the Zapruder film and have viewed it numerous times, on TV, in popular films, and on the internet. Yet few outside the research community are aware of an even more important film shot across the street at the same time, one that showed the stockade fence on top the grassy knoll during the ambush.

The key to solving this crime is distinguishing important evidence from the avalanche of fake whistleblowers seeding rabbit holes salted with time bombs. The Nix film remains one of the most overlooked pieces of evidence, mostly because significant parts were removed, and the original fragments disappeared. We know the Zapruder film was likely worked over as well, but there was something in the footage Orville Nix shot that day that made it necessary to lower the veils completely with a magic disappearing wand.

Like many in Dealey Plaza that afternoon, Nix was convinced a shot came from behind the stockade fence. After the shots rang out, most people in the plaza hit the ground. But when the shooting was over and the limo long gone, everyone raced toward the triple overpass, which was the only way to get behind that fence. All this was captured by Nix. After the assassination, the FBI visited film labs and requested assistance locating evidence. They seized the original from Nix, and when he got it back, it had been cut into several segments and crucial frames appeared to have been removed or destroyed in the process.

Strangely, Nix played poker with the head of the local Secret Service and had been told by him that the Texas School Book Depository was the best spot for filming the motorcade. One would have thought the media might have interest in that detail, but Nix never got any attention beyond the first wave, and refused to talk about the assassination in later years, yet always remained convinced there was a second gunman behind the picket fence. The disappearance of the original film while in government hands is evidence of a cover-up, and it seems possible an original Nix film could eventually have been used to prove the Zapruder film was tampered with as well.

Reflections on a grassy knoll

David Powers.

Those seeking an understanding of the JFK assassination should take note of the framing of Steven Avery, because the Avery case provides a more modern illustration on why false convictions are so often manufactured. It’s not that everyone involved is part of a knowing conspiracy, just that law enforcement runs a straight line once an initial trajectory has been charted. Almost all scientific research papers are tainted by some agenda, which is why so much of today’s science is unreliable. Same thing as science deployed by law enforcement.

The Warren Commission cherry-picked eyewitness testimony to JFK’s murder, and even then, were forced to put tremendous pressure on witnesses to change their stories. It’s well-known FBI agents instructed the witnesses: “If you didn’t see Lee Harvey Oswald alone in the Sixth Floor with a rifle, it’s best you didn’t see anything at all.” Get in line or shut up. And suddenly a few of those who wouldn’t shut up, wound up mysteriously dead.

David F. Powers was JFK’s personal aide and the man who spent the most time with the President outside his own family. He was riding in the car behind Kennedy’s when they drove into the ambush and he never did shut up. Powers was standing up shooting 8 mm film in the backseat as the caravan departed Love Field.

On the way into town, the caravan passed a family holding a sign that begged JFK to stop and shake hands. The plea was so effective Kennedy ordered his driver to pull over. If you watch the film closely, you’ll notice that whenever the limo slows or stops, Secret Service agents immediately position themselves to shield the President from potential harm. Normally, the two primary agents for this duty ride a running board on the back of JFK’s limo, where twin handholds were installed. Strangely, the pair were called off their usual station and moved to running boards on the trailing vehicle, the one Powers was seated in. But whenever JFK’s limo slows, the two agents immediately jump off and run alongside. Unfortunately, Powers film ran out just before the caravan turned left on Elm Street, or he would have obtained the definitive recording of the assassination.

“I was assigned to ride in the Secret Service automobile which proceeded immediately behind the President’s car in the motorcade,” Powers told the Warren Commission. “I sat in the jump seat on the right side of the car and Kenneth O’Donnell sat in the jump seat on the left side of the car.

“At that time we were traveling very slowly, no more than 12 miles an hour…Shortly thereafter the first shot went off and it sounded to me as if it were a firecracker. I noticed then that the President moved quite far to his left after the shot from the extreme right hand side where he had been sitting. There was a second shot and Governor Connally disappeared from sight and then there was a third shot which took off the top of the President’s head and had the sickening sound of a grapefruit splattering against the side of a wall. The total time between the first and third shots was about 5 or 6 seconds. My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead, but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple overpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush.”

Powers delivered this testimony despite intense pressure to reverse and say the shots came from behind. Had these three bullets been whistling over his head, as suggested by the Warren Commission, he would have more likely felt he was riding away from an ambush than into one. Although O’Donnell had the same impression of shots from behind the stockade fence, he completely caved to the pressure and reversed his testimony to satisfy the official story. Both men were experienced veterans familiar with sounds of lethal firearms in action.

Tip O’Neill, who retired after serving five consecutive sessions as Speaker of the House, wrote in his 1987 autobiography, Man of the House, page 178: “I was never one of the people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s death, but five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination. I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.

“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.

“You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”

Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s. Kenny O’Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story. And so there will always be some skepticism in my mind about the cause of Jack’s death. I used to think that the only people who doubted the conclusions of the Warren Commission were crackpots. Now, however, I’m not so sure.”

So you have two of the nearest witnesses to the scene, located 20 feet behind the President, and both were convinced shots came from behind the fence, and possibly one from inside the triple overpass. And one of the most connected and powerful people in Congress believed they were telling the truth, which means O’Neill also believed the Warren Commissioned tampered with the evidence and made the wrong conclusions for some unknown reason.

The Curious Case of Gary Underhill

John Garrett Underhill descended from Captain John Underhill, original commander of the Massachusetts Bay Colony militia and also the primary perpetrator behind the Mystic Massacre of several hundred Pequot. His grandfather (on his mother’s side) was a former general who’d played a leading role in creating the National Rifle Association.

Underhill studied linguistics at Harvard and graduated in 1937. With his blue blood, he was a natural fit into military intel and quickly rose to chief editor of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division. Following the war, he became the military correspondent for Life magazine, no doubt working hand-in-glove with the newly-formed CIA, staffed mostly with his wartime buddies from G2 and OSS. He acquired one of the world’s largest collections of Soviet small arms outside Russia.

Beginning in 1949, he became an informant for the CIA. Two years later, he co-wrote a 6,500 word essay, “The Tragedy of the US Army,” for Look magazine, published February 13, 1951. According to the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, he was “recalled to brown suit service after finishing a 6,500 word article.”

He served as Deputy Director for the Civil Defense of Washington, D.C., and worked on setting up “Operation Alert” in 1955, although days before it was held he claimed the exercise was “so inadequate it couldn’t cope with a brushfire threatening a doghouse in a backyard,” comments that led to his dismissal from the alert moments before it began.

Immediately following JFK’s assassination, Underhill drove to Charlene Fitzsimmon’s house on Long Island in a state of panic, and conveyed a sudden overwhelming desire to leave the country and disappear. He claimed Kennedy had been killed by the CIA’s executive action team, and some people who were profiteering off drugs from the Far East. He knew the people involved, and he knew they knew he knew, which is why he feared for his own life. “Oswald is a patsy,” he said. “They set him up. The bastards have done something outrageous. They’ve killed the President! I’ve been listening and hearing things. I couldn’t have believed they’d get away with it, but they did!”

In 1966, when Jim Garrison began his investigation of the crime, he’d heard about a CIA informant with important information, a detail noted in Garrison’s lengthy interview in Playboy magazine. Garrison was eager to get a deposition from this person of interest, but before he could locate Underhill, his corpse was discovered in bed, a bullet hole behind the left ear.

A memo from the CIA to the Justice Department later uncovered through FOIA noted that Underhill had a connection to Harold Isaacs, who knew Oswald’s cousin Marilyn Murret. The memo also stated Underhill was not an employee of the CIA, had “infrequent contact with the New York office” and “committed suicide on May 8, 1964.”

The Two Oswalds

Intelligence operations follow patterns and the most complex ones deploy diversions. It’s what a stage magician does when needing to hide something. First, he attracts attention to the other hand.
On 9/11, for example, it appears nearly simultaneous to turning off the transponders, the hijacked planes crossed paths with other planes, which may have been done to swap the two out, or just to muddy their trail.

Oswald in Mexco?

It was a huge problem that no photo of Oswald entering the Cuban and/or Russian embassy could be found. And neither did a voice recording emerge. Hard evidence on anyone who walked into and/or called the Cuban or Russian embassies in Mexico should have been easy to relocate, and if it did exist, it mysteriously disappeared. Of course, having a tape of someone impersonating Oswald on the phone would have been irrefutable proof of a larger conspiracy.

Minutes after the assassination, Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig saw Oswald exit the Texas Schoolbook Depository and enter a light-green Rambler station wagon driven by a stocky Cuban (probably David Morales) before speeding off in the direction of Oak Cliff.

The CIA had a safe house in Oak Cliff stuffed with anti-Castro Cubans. Oswald had recently left his wife and child at Ruth Paine’s in Irving, while renting a room in Oak Cliff over 12 miles away, perhaps because operations were heating up and becoming dangerous and he wanted to distance himself from his family and shield them from potential blowback. He’d spent the previous night at Paine’s with Marina.

Officer J.D. Tippit was involved somehow in this operation and was aware of the danger because he told his son that morning, “No matter what happens today, just remember I love you.” That was the last time his son saw his dad alive. It seems possible Tippit may have been one of the few policeman who knew Oswald’s true identity as a CIA/FBI undercover informant. He knew something big was happening that day, and he seems to have become panicked after he learned JFK was dead.

Tippit was driving frantically around Oak Cliff looking for someone, probably Oswald. A police car, perhaps Tippit’s, pulled up in front of Oswald’s rooming house right after he arrived home to retrieve his revolver. The car honked twice and then moved on, an obvious signal of some sort. Since two patrolmen had escorted the three tramps to anonymity earlier that day, however, I have to suspect those two cops could have been the same spooks who honked their horn, signaling it was time to go to the next stage of operations.  I’ll always wonder if those fake cops circled the block and then picked Oswald up at some prearranged location to deposit him at the Texas Theater, and then rushed off to 10th Street to plant Oswald’s wallet at the Tippit murder scene.

Tippit was blocking an alley on East 10th Street seven blocks from the theater when he rolled down his passenger side window to speak to a pedestrian. It seems a police car may have already been in that alley nearby as police were on the scene almost immediately after the shooting. When Tippit exited his car and came around to talk further, or perhaps to take the pedestrian into custody, the pedestrian shot him four times, including two point-blank shots to the head. Obviously, the shooter wanted insurance Tippit would not survive. Some sort of conversation took place and escalated from there and Tippit apparently didn’t comprehend the danger he was in or he would not have left his vehicle without drawing his gun. It was a mob-style execution and not a gun fight.
The first cop on the scene picked up a wallet next to the spreading pool of Tippit’s blood, and it had Lee Harvey Oswald’s military ID. There were also four empty cartridges discovered at the scene as the shooter had emptied his revolver while walking away. How convenient! It’s not often a murderer leaves his ID and spent cartridges like a trail of breadcrumbs to the magic kingdom. At this point there were zero suspects in JFK’s assassination, but immediately after Tippit’s murder, the story went out Lee Harvey Oswald was a suspect and had just murdered a policeman possibly as part of his getaway. Officer down! The response was staggering and almost every patrol car in Dallas converged on Oak Cliff. The focus was instantly concentrated entirely on Oswald and that focus never wavered.

By the time Tippit was shot, Oswald was already inside the Texas Theater. He’d been directed there by someone and was likely supposed to make contact with someone he didn’t know. A theater is a logical location for a clandestine rendezvous because safe houses need to stay safe and we know there was a CIA safe house nearby. Oswald sat first in the balcony, but soon bought popcorn and moved down to the main floor, sitting for a few minutes right next to someone before moving on to another person. After he sat right next to a pregnant woman and had a brief conversation, she got up and moved to the balcony while Oswald moved again to sit next to another.

Whoever shot Tippit also came to the theater, but not before dumping a windbreaker under a vehicle behind a gas station. Suddenly, like those planes crossing as transponders go off, the two Oswalds came in close proximity for maybe the first time, and one of them had the entire Dallas police force on his tail. My best guess is the double came in a few minutes after Oswald, and he went unseen up into the balcony where the pregnant woman was now seated.

When the police arrived, they stopped the film, turned on the house lights and approached the audience from the stage and began inspecting everyone’s IDs. When they got to Oswald, he allegedly jumped up and shouted, “It’s all over now,” and punched the nearest officer, who fell into the seats. He then pulled out his revolver and pointed it at the ceiling, or perhaps the floor, or maybe at the officer. Eyewitness testimony conflicts from this point. Witnesses claim to have heard the gun click, but no shots were fired. The arresting officer later somewhat absurdly claimed he’d placed his thumb on the hammer to prevent it from going off. Perhaps the revolver had a bent firing pin or was unloaded. Perhaps the speech was part of a script fed to him by his handler. Oswald was pummeled by many officers, handcuffed and taken out the front entrance to be greeted by an immense mob that included some media. He was not assassinated in the theater as might have been expected from flourishing a revolver shouting, “It’s over.” But then later on, some witnesses would say Oswald uttered those words while being led out of the building in handcuffs, and that’s the problem: the most theatrical version possible often gets written in stone.

It appears the police may have continued inspecting IDs after Oswald was removed from the theater and may have gone up into the balcony where a man who looked somewhat like Oswald was also taken into custody and also handcuffed, only this person was taken out the back door and never showed up at the police station. And I say this because we have many witnesses to an Oswald coming out the front and one witness to an Oswald coming out the back. One of the oddest points of this case is we only know the names of a few people who were in that theater out of more than two dozen who bought tickets that day.

It’s worth noting Oswald had a wallet on him when he was in the theater, leading to speculation about the mysterious wallet dropped at the scene of Tippit’s murder, the wallet that put Oswald on the map in the first place. Sorta like the passport found at the World Trade Center that was disappeared from the story later on.

But perhaps the most bizarre saga of the two Oswalds is the story told by a refrigerator mechanic to the FBI four days after the assassination.

On November 20th, at 10:30 AM, Ralph Leon Yates was driving through Oak Cliff and stopped to pick up a hitchhiker near the Beckley Avenue, where Oswald lived. The hitchhiker carried a package wrapped in brown wrapping paper about 4 foot to 4½ feet long, saying it contained curtain rods. Yates mentioned the upcoming presidential visit and the hitchhiker responded by asking if he thought a person could assassinate the president and whether that might be best accomplished from the top of a building or out a window high up with a rifle. The man then asked about the President’s parade route and whether that might be changed in the next few days.

When Yates got to work, he told his coworker about this strange incident and later gave his story to the FBI on November 26, and again on December 10, January 3 and 4, concluding with a polygraph test, which he passed.

According to JFK the Unspeakable, Yates was soon committed to Woodlawn Hospital for an evaluation and then moved to Terrell State Hospital for eight years, and then placed in two different hospitals for another three years. He never abandoned his story about giving Oswald a ride to work with the murder weapon, no matter how many electric shocks he got. The Warren Commission dismissed his story as a fantasy, probably because they had a better version for how the rifle got into the building from Frazier, although Frazier never believed the two-foot long package he saw on the back seat of his car was a 36-inch carbine, no matter how long they interrogated him, and Frazier was badgered for nearly 12 hours, and only released after he demanded (and passed) a lie detector test, which was pretty savy for a 19-year-old kid. To this day, Frazier believes Oswald was framed.

Yates, on the other hand, died in a psyche ward of congestive heart failure at age 39.

Mark Lane was one of the few skeptics allowed to testify at the Warren Commission, and could have easily shredded the official story had he brought attention to the Odio affidavit and a few others. Instead Lane launched into a bizarre attack on the backyard photo of Oswald as being a fake and also claimed the rifle in the photo was not the same as the rifle as found at the Texas School Book Depository because it had no scope. Lane had sought to examine the rifle in custody and complained bitterly about not being allowed to.

I find this fascinating because Lane was certainly aware of Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig’s testimony stating the rifle found on the sixth floor was a German Mauser. Why would he need to examine the highly inferior Carcano when obviously it was a swap-out? Before Lane appeared in Dallas, newspaperman Penn Jones was already on the scene, and highly suspicious of a military intelligence operation. Jones, however, was elbowed out of the spotlight and replaced by Lane. Apparently, seizing the center of gravity on a conspiracy is standard ops for counterintelligence, and they do it with every major conspiracy.

Even more suspicious is Oswald’s wife admitted taking the backyard photo, and a different take from same the photo shoot signed by Oswald had been presented to George de Mohrenschildt, a man who started out spooking for the Nazis. So why would Lane make this photo the crux of a conspiracy case, unless he was intentionally planting a rabbit hole with a time bomb?

Buell Frazier is a clue to the JFK assassination

Buell Frazier was only 19 when he met Lee Harvey Oswald. They both worked at the Texas School Book Depository for minimum wage ($1.50) and Frazier sometimes drove Oswald the 15 miles to work if his broken-down Chevy was functional. The day of the assassination Oswald appeared with a two-foot-long package and told Frazier they were curtain rods. When they arrived at work, Oswald carried the package between his palm and armpit.

Frazier never swallowed the story that short package was actually a 36-inch Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Nor did he swallow the story that soft-spoken, highly intelligent Lee Oswald shot JFK that day.

A much different, longer package from the one Frazier had seen that morning was produced for the media. Enormous efforts were made to connect Oswald to the murder weapon, and some of this activity seems to have involved fabricating evidence as it went along, which is why there was so much revision. The problem with the enormous bag shown to the media is it was put together with tape from the book depository, indicating it wasn’t the bag Oswald carried because his bag had been manufactured off-site.

I have no doubt Oswald was instructed to bring a package to work that day because he was seen departing the scene in a green Rambler station wagon driven by David Morales, or someone who looked much like Morales. Two others might have been hiding on the floorboards inside, one of whom could have been Ted Shackley.

Frazier was put through a 12-hour hostile interrogation and told at one point that Oswald had named him as a co-conspirator. He demanded and eventually got a lie detector test, which he easily passed. However, the hostility of the police towards his belief in Oswald’s innocence caused Frazier to lie very low for a long time. He was pressured to change his story and also change the length of the bag by the Warren Commission, but never wavered. The Commission eventually rejected his story and concluded his memory was not accurate.

The disappearing Mauser is a key to the JFK assassination

Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig is one of the greatest unsung heroes who sought justice after JFK’s murder in Dallas. Craig arrived at Dealey Plaza seconds after the shooting and raced to the picket fence at the top of the knoll, closely following the motorcycle cop who’d ditched his bike to run up the hill. The scene behind the fence was chaotic because a large number of people had already gathered. There were footprints and cigarette butts near where many witnesses saw a plume of smoke appear as the shots rang out.

Craig noticed a woman attempting to drive out of the parking lot and stopped her, taking her into custody for questioning. Deputy Sheriff Lewis appeared and took her off his hands.

Craig then crossed Elm Street and began interviewing witnesses. Arnold Rowland and his wife said they saw a man with a rifle in a Texas School Book Depository window overlooking the plaza before the presidential limo arrived. They hadn’t said anything because they assumed he was a secret service agent. Deputy Lewis appeared again and took the Rowlands off his hands.

Suddenly, a shrill whistle sounded and Craig noticed a man in his twenties run down the knoll from the direction of the depository. A green Rambler station wagon slowed and the man jumped inside. Craig wanted to detain this vehicle, but traffic was intense and he failed to cross in time. When he did make it across, Craig went to the depository steps and was greeted by a man claiming to be a Secret Service agent. Craig began talking about the suspicious Rambler, but the agent seemed little interested. Craig’s boss, Sheriff Decker appeared and told Craig the suspect had left the scene and someone should search inside the depository.

Upon arriving at the sixth floor, Craig quickly located three spent cartridges by the southeast corner window, all lined up as if carefully set in place, something he found highly suspicious. One cartridge had a strange crimp. A rifle was soon located stashed in a pile of cardboard boxes. Stamped on the barrel was “7.65 Mauser.” Captain Fritz, chief of homicide for Dallas, arrived and took possession. That night the murder weapon used to kill JFK was described on all three networks as a German Mauser.

By the way, the Mauser is a short-barrel carbine invented for use by cavalry officers. Carbines are not typically a weapon of choice among professional snipers due to limited range and low bullet velocity. They are, however, slightly easier to conceal than long barrel rifles. The Italians made a cheap imitation of the Mauser, the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano.

Problem is the cartridges on the floor were 6.5 Carcanos, which meant the rifle and cartridges didn’t match.

“I arrived at Capt. Fritz office shortly after 4:30 PM,” wrote Craig later. “I was met by Agent Bookhout from the F.B.I., who took my name and place of employment. The door to Capt. Fritz‘ personal office was open and the blinds on the windows were closed, so that one had to look through the doorway in order to see into the room. I looked through the open door at the request of Capt. Fritz and identified the man who I saw running down the grassy knoll and enter the Rambler station wagon—and it WAS Lee Harvey Oswald. Fritz and I entered his private office together. He told Oswald, this man (pointing to me) saw you leave. At which time the suspect replied, I told you people I did. Fritz, apparently trying to console Oswald, said, take it easy, son—we‘re just trying to find out what happened. Fritz then said, what about the car? Oswald replied, leaning forward on Fritz’ desk, that station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine—don’t try to drag her into this. Sitting back in his chair, Oswald said very disgustedly and very low, everybody will know who I am now.”

Because he was a Dallas police officer, it was impossible for the Warren Commission to completely ignore Craig. However, when the Commission report was released significant changes were made to his testimony. Meanwhile, Craig was ordered never to talk about the case with anyone in the media. After being caught talking to someone, he was fired.

Like other important witnesses, Craig was shot at, driven off the road, and hounded at almost every twist and turn of his remaining short life. As a key witness to the assassination, he’d assumed he’d become famous someday, but instead was quickly flushed down a rabbit hole.

Many early gatekeepers like Mary Ferrell worked hard to discredit him, which, in hindsight is probably the best indication of how important he really was. Mary Ferrell was a lawyer for Mobile who made the assassination her life’s obsession. She never really managed to connect the dots on the case, even though the most obvious trail led straight into JM/Wave, William Harvey, Ted Shackley and David Morales.

Craig sadly died of a gunshot to the chest in 1975. Self-inflicted so they say and it could be true because he was a completely broken man whose autobiography had been universally rejected by the publishing world.

(Excerpted from Killing Kennedy: The Real Story.)