This is an interview with Jim Douglass the author and one of JFK and the Unspeakable one of the

most inspiring people I have ever heard. If you want to know the TRUE history of the USA in the
sixties, the JFK Assassination the who and WHY; as well as about America subsequently, you must
watch this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwECsq459d4
A casualty of peace!

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass
by Ralph Maud
I had been waiting for this book for a long time. It finally answered, to my satisfaction, the big
questions about John F. Kennedys assassination on November 22, 1963.
The best we had to go on before was the simple fact that whoever did it knew one thing for sure: that
LBJ would succeed JFK. So it seemed very much as though a bunch of Texans, with a few well placed
shots, got in one of their own as president. I went to Dealey Plaza and saw how perfect it was for an
ambush; just as in any good western, they had cut him off at the pass.
JFK and the Unspeakable reveals the much bigger story. It was the military-industrial complex that
Eisenhower warned about in league with the CIA that did it. And they did it not only because
Kennedy was going to withdraw from Vietnam and make up with Castro, but he was also going to
stop the Cold War altogether.
Most of us assumed Kennedy was a war president. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, he was on
television warning us that atomic reprisals might come down on us. I was in a bar in Buffalo and
looked up at the screen and thought, You bastard. But what I didnt know until now was that
Kennedy had initiated a personal and friendly correspondence with Khrushchev and that the sabre-
rattling was just a posture, for the time being. He was not a war president at all; he was a peace
president. And the military-industrial complex, which needed the Cold War for pride and profit,
knew it and felt so threatened by him they took measures.
Before this book, I had not been aware that two weeks before Dallas, there had been preparations for an
assassination attempt during a scheduled visit of the president to Chicago. Some of the Secret Service
seem to have been in on the plot, but there was a leak and the Chicago visit was cancelled. In Dallas,
the Secret Service kept mum and stood aside while the CIA maneuvred its puppets.
One puppet, of course, was Jack Ruby, the club owner who was later given the job of taking out
Oswald, the CIA patsy. The story of Julia Ann Mercer summarizes the banality of the unspeakable.
An employee of Automat Distributors in Dallas, twenty-three-year-old Mercer was caught in a traffic
jam in Dealey Plaza about an hour and a half before the presidential motorcade would pass through.
She saw a green van parked up on the curb and, before her eyes, a man pulled out a rifle case wrapped
in paper and carried it up the grassy knoll. Later, on TV, she recognized the driver of the green van as
Jack Ruby. She talked to the FBI at some length, but when her testimony was referred to in the Warren
Commission report, it was the opposite of what she actually said: Mercer could not identify any of the
photographs. The FBI was covering up any evidence that suggested conspiracy. Where had the orders
come from?
We learn from this book that on the morning of May 1, 1962, President Kennedy met in the Oval Office
with a delegation of Quakers dedicated to a process of total disarmament and world order. That
group, in this Pleromic story, can represent the light that JFK was moving toward. Who then, were the
representatives of the unspeakable darkness that fatally overwhelmed him? That is the one weakness
of Douglass substantial and courageous book. We get no names attached to the unspeakable evil at
the core of the conspiracy. Yet we do know who was responsible, who made the decision to go ahead
with the killing. Those names have to be included in the roster of large multinational organizations,
especially those in the armaments and death-dealing businesses.

Ralph Maud was a professor in the Simon Fraser University Department of English from the charter
year 1965 to his retirement in 1994 and the founder of the librarys Contemporary Literature
Collection.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JFK and the Unspeakable

by James W. Douglass
Reviewed by James DiEugenio

This book is the first volume of a projected trilogy. Orbis Books has commissioned
James W. Douglass to write three books on the assassinations of the 1960's. The second
will be on the murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, while the third will be on
the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.
This is one of the few books on the Kennedy case that I actually wished was longer. In
the purest sense, Jim Douglass is not a natural writer. But it seems to me he has labored
meticulously to fashion a well organized, thoroughly documented, and felicitously
composed piece of workmanship that is both comprehensible and easy to read. These
attributes do not extend from simplicity of design or lack of ambition. This book takes in
quite a lot of territory. In some ways it actually extends the frontier. In others it actually
opens new paths. To achieve that kind of scope with a relative economy of means, and to
make the experience both fast and pleasant, is quite an achievement.
I should inform the reader at the outset: this is not just a book about JFK's assassination.
I would estimate that the book is 2/3 about Kennedy's presidency and 1/3 about his
assassination. And I didn't mind that at all, because Douglass almost seamlessly knits
together descriptions of several of Kennedy's policies with an analysis of how those
policies were both monitored and resisted, most significantly in Cuba and Vietnam. This
is one of the things that makes the book enlightening and worthy of understanding.
One point of worthwhile comparison would be to David Talbot's previous
volume Brothers. In my view, Douglass' book is better. One of my criticisms of Talbot's
book was that I didn't think his analysis of certain foreign policy areas was rigorous or
comprehensive enough. You can't say that about Douglass. I also criticized Talbot for
using questionable witnesses like Angelo Murgado and Timothy Leary to further certain
dubious episodes about Kennedy's life and/or programs. Douglass avoided that pitfall.
One way that Douglass achieves this textured effect is in his quest for new sources. One
of the problems I had with many Kennedy assassination books for a long time is their
insularity. That is, they all relied on pretty much the same general established
bibliography. In my first book, Destiny Betrayed, I tried to break out of that mildewed
and restrictive mold. I wanted to widen the lens in order to place the man and the crime
in a larger perspective. Douglass picks up that ball and runs with it. There are sources
he utilizes here that have been terribly underused, and some that haven't been used
before. For instance, unlike Talbot, Douglass sources Richard Mahoney's
extraordinary JFK:Ordeal in Africa, one of the finest books ever written on President
Kennedy's foreign policy. To fill in the Kennedy-Castro back channel of 1963 he
uses In the Eye of the Storm by Carlos Lechuga and William Attwood's The Twilight
Struggle. On Kennedy and Vietnam the author utilizes Anne Blair's Lodge in
Vietnam,Ellen Hammer's A Death in November, and Zalin Grant'sFacing the Phoenix.
And these works allow Douglass to show us how men like Henry Cabot Lodge and
Lucien Conein did not just obstruct, but actually subverted President Kennedy's wishes
in Saigon. On the assassination side, Douglass makes good use of that extraordinary feat
of research Harvey and Lee by John Armstrong, the difficult to get manuscript by Roger
Craig, When They Kill a President, plus the work of little known authors in the field like
Bruce Adamson and hard to get manuscripts like Edwin Black's exceptional essay on the
Chicago plot. Further, he interviewed relatively new witnesses like Butch Burroughs
and the survivors of deceased witnesses like Thomas Vallee, Bill Pitzer and Ralph
Yates. In the use of these persons and sources, Douglass has pushed the envelope
forward.
But it's not just what is in the book. It is how it is molded together that deserves
attention. For instance, in the first chapter, Douglass is describing the Cuban Missile
Crisis at length (using the newest transcription of the secretly recorded tapes by Sheldon
Stern.) He then segues to Kennedy's American University speech. At this point,
Douglass then introduces the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald and his relation to the U-2
(p. 37). This is beautifully done because he has been specifically discussing the U-2
flights over Cuba during the Missile Crisis, and he subliminally matches both Kennedy
and Oswald in their most extreme Cold War backdrops. He then switches back to the
American University speech, contrasting its rather non-descript reception in the New
York Times with its joyous welcome in Russia, thus showing that Kennedy's efforts for
dtente were more appreciated by his presumed enemy than by the domestic pundit
class.
These artful movements would be good enough. But the design of the book goes
further. As mentioned above, in his first introduction of Oswald Douglass mentions the
Nags Head, North Carolina military program which launched American soldiers into
Russia as infiltrators. Near the end of the book (p. 365), with Oswald in jail about to be
killed by Jack Ruby, Douglass returns to that military program with Oswald's famous
thwarted phone call to Raleigh, North Carolina: the spy left out in the cold attempting to
contact his handlers for information as how to proceed. But not realizing that his
attempted call will now guarantee his execution. Thus the author closes a previously
prepared arc. It isn't easy to do things like that. And it doesn't really take talent. One just
has to be something of a literary craftsman: bending over the table, honing and refining.
But it's the kind of detail work that pays off. It maintains the reader's attention along the
way and increases his understanding by the end.
II
One of the book's most notable achievements is the 3-D picture of the Castro-Kennedy
back channel of 1963. Douglass' work on this episode is detailed, complete, and
illuminating in more ways than one. From a multiplicity of books, periodicals, and
interviews, the author produces not opinions or spin on what happened. And not after
the fact, wishy-washy post-mortems. But actual first-hand knowledge of the negotiations
by the people involved in them.
It started in January of 1963. Attorney John Donovan had been negotiating the release
of the Bay of Pigs prisoners when Castro's physician and aide Rene Vallejo broached the
subject of normalizing relations with the USA (p. 56). Right here, Douglass subtly tells
us something important. For Vallejo would not have broached such a subject without
Castro's permission. In approaching these talks, Dean Rusk and the State Department
wanted to establish preconditions. Namely that Cuba would have to break its
Sino/Soviet ties. Kennedy overruled this qualification with the following: "We don't
want to present Castro with a condition that he obviously cannot fulfill." NSC assistant
Gordon Chase explained Kennedy's intercession, "The President himself is very
interested in this one." (pgs. 57-58)
Because the State Department was cut in at the start, the CIA got wind of the opening.
Douglass makes the case that David Phillips and the Cuban exiles reacted by having the
militant group Alpha 66 begin to raid Russian ships sailing toward Cuba. Antonio
Veciana later stated that Phillips had arranged the raids because, "Kennedy would have
to be forced to make a decision and the only way was to put him up against the wall." (p.
57) The initial raid was followed by another a week later.
Phillips did indeed force Kennedy into making a decision. At the end of March, the
Justice Department began to stop Cuban exiles from performing these raids off of
American territory. This resulted in crackdowns and arrests in Florida and Louisiana.
And it was this crackdown that provoked a bitter falling out between the leaders of the
CIA created Cuban Revolutionary Council and President Kennedy. Dr. Jose Miro
Cardona stated that the "struggle for Cuba was in the process of being liquidated" for
"every refugee has received his last allotment this month, forcing them to relocate." (p.
59) The CRC had been a special project of both Phillips and Howard Hunt. As the
Associated Press further reported in April, "The dispute between the Cuban exile leaders
and the Kennedy administration was symbolized here today by black crepe hung from
the doors of exiles' homes." (Ibid)
Clearly, Kennedy was changing both speeds and direction. At this time, Donovan
visited Castro and raised the point of Kennedy clamping down on the exile groups.
Castro replied to this with the provocative statement that his "ideal government was not
to be Soviet oriented." (p. 60) When newscaster Lisa Howard visited Castro in late
April, she asked how a rapprochement between the USA and Cuba could be achieved.
Castro replied that the "Steps were already being taken" and Kennedy's limitations on
the exile raids was the first one. (p. 61)
As Douglass observes, every Castro overture for normalization up to that point had been
noted by the CIA. And CIA Director John McCone urged "that no active steps be taken
on the rapprochement matter at this time." (p. 61) Deftly, the author points out that--
almost simultaneous with this--Oswald inexplicably moves from Dallas to New Orleans
to begin his high profile pro-Castro activities. And later that summer, CIA case officers
will secretly meet with Rolando Cubela to begin another attempt on Castro's life.
Oblivious to this, the back channel was now picked up and furthered by Howard and
William Attwood. Howard reported that Castro was even more explicit now about
dealing with Kennedy over the Russian influence in Cuba. He was willing to discuss
Soviet personnel and military hardware on the island and even compensation for
American lands and investments. The article she wrote at this time concluded with a
request that a government official be sent to negotiate these matters with Fidel. (p. 70)
This is where former journalist and then diplomat Attwood stepped in. Knowing that
Attwood had talked with Castro before, Kennedy instructed him to make contact with
Carlos Lechuga. Lechuga was Cuba's ambassador at the United Nations, and Kennedy
felt this would be a logical next step to continue the dialogue and perhaps set some kind
of agenda and parameters. Howard arranged the meeting between the two opposing
diplomats. Attwood told Lechuga that Kennedy felt relations could not be changed
overnight, but something "had to be done about it and a start had to be made." (p. 71)
Lechuga replied that Castro had liked Kennedy's American University speech and he felt
that Castro might OK a visit by Attwood to Cuba. This, of course, would have been a
significant milestone.
A funny and revealing thing happened next. Both sides alerted the other that they would
be making boilerplate anti-Cuba and anti-America speeches. (Adlai Stevenson would be
doing the anti-Cuba one at the UN.) This clearly implies that the players understood that
while relations were warming in private, motions had to be gone through in public to
please the pundit class.
Howard then requested that Vallejo ask Castro if Fidel would approve a visit by Attwood
in the near future. Attwood believed this message never got through to Castro. So
Kennedy decided to get the message to Castro via Attwood's friend, French journalist
Jean Daniel. (p. 72) What Kennedy told Daniel is somewhat stunning. Thankfully, and I
believe for the first time in such a book, Douglass quotes it at length. I will summarize
it here.
Kennedy wanted Daniel to tell Castro that he understood the horrible exploitation,
colonization, and humiliation the history of Cuba represented and that the people of
Cuba had endured. He even painfully understood that the USA had been part of this
during the Batista regime. Startlingly, he said he approved of Castro's declarations made
in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. He added, "In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in
agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear." Daniel was
somewhat taken aback by these sentiments. But, Kennedy continued, the dilemma now
was that Cuba -- because of its Soviet ties -- had become part of the Cold War. And this
had led to the Missile Crisis. Kennedy felt that Khrushchev understood all these
ramifications now, after that terrible thirteen days.
The president concluded with this, "...but so far as Fidel Castro is concerned, I must say
I don't know whether he realizes this, or even if he cares about it." Kennedy smiled and
then ended Daniel's instructions with this: "You can tell me whether he does when you
come back."
Daniel then went to Havana. On November 19th Castro walked into his hotel. Fidel
was fully aware of the Attwood/Lechuga meetings. He was also aware of Kennedy's
briefing of Daniel. He had found out about this through Howard. In fact, he had told
her he did not think it would be a good idea for him to meet Attwood in New York. He
suggested that the meeting could be arranged by picking up Attwood in Mexico and
flying him to Cuba. Castro also agreed that Che Guevara should be left out of the talks
since he opposed their ultimate aim. Attwood said that Lechuga and he should meet to
discuss a full agenda for a later meeting between himself and Castro. This was done per
Kennedy's instructions, and JFK wanted to brief Attwood beforehand on what the
agenda should be. Things were heading into a higher gear.
Daniel was unaware of the above when Castro walked into his room for a six-hour talk
about Kennedy. (pgs. 85-89) I won't even attempt to summarize this conversation. I will
only quote Castro thusly, "Suddenly a president arrives on the scene who tries to support
the interest of another class ... " Clearly elated by Daniel's message, Castro and the
journalist spent a large part of the next three days together. Castro even stated that JFK
could now become the greatest president since Lincoln.
On the third day, Daniel was having lunch with Fidel when the phone rang. The news
about Kennedy being shot in Dallas had arrived. Stunned, Castro hung up the phone, sat
down and then repeated over and over, "This is bad news ... This is bad news ... This is
bad news." (p. 89) A few moments later when the radio broadcast the report stating that
Kennedy was now dead, Castro stood up and said, "Everything is changed. Everything
is going to change." (p. 90)
To say he was prophetic is putting it mildly. Attwood would later write that what it took
11 months to build was gone in about three weeks. By December 17th it was clear that
President Johnson was brushing it all aside. Retroactively, Attwood came to conclude
that it had all really ended in Dealey Plaza. He finalized his thoughts about the excellent
progress made up to that point with this: "There is no doubt in my mind. If there had
been no assassination we probably would have moved into negotiations leading toward
normalization of relations with Cuba." (p. 177)
Douglass has done a real service here. Gus Russo will now have an even more difficult
time in defending the thesis of his nonsensical book. No one can now say, as the authors
ofUltimate Sacrifice do that these negotiations were "headed nowhere." And if they do,
we will now know what to think of them.
III
Equally as good as the above is Douglass' work on Kennedy and Vietnam. Especially in
regards to the events leading up to the November coup against Ngo Dinh Diem and the
eventual murder of both he and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.
Taking a helpful cue from David Kaiser's American Tragedy,Douglass begins his
discourse by analyzing Kennedy's single-minded pursuit of a neutralization policy in
neighboring Laos. (pgs. 98-101) Douglass exemplifies just how single-minded JFK was
on this by excerpting a phone call the president had with his point man on the 1962 Laos
negotiations, Averill Harriman: "Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in
Laos. I don't want to put troops in." (p. 104)
Unfortunately, no one felt the same way about Vietnam. Except President Kennedy. The
Pentagon, the CIA, Lyndon Johnson and the Nhu brothers all looked askance at Laos as
a model for Vietnam. (p. 106) Even the one general that JFK favored, Maxwell Taylor,
told him to send in combat troops as early as 1961. (Ibid) After Taylor's visit there,
Ambassador Frederick Nolting wired Kennedy that "conversations over the past ten days
with Vietnamese in various walks of life" showed a "virtually unanimous desire for
introduction US forces in Viet Nam." (p. 107) In other words, his own ambassador was
trying to sell him on the idea that the general populace wanted the American army
introduced there. Finally, both Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara and his assistant
Ros Gilpatric also joined the chorus. As Taylor later recalled, no one was actually
against it except President Kennedy "The president just didn't want to be convinced ... .
It was really the President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go in."
(Ibid) But in 1961, Kennedy was not yet ready to withdraw. So he threw a sop to the
hawks and approved a new influx of 15, 000 advisers.
In April of 1962, John K. Galbraith sent a memo to Kennedy proposing a negotiated
settlement with the North Vietnamese. The Joint Chiefs, State Department, and
Harriman vigorously opposed the idea. It was too much like Laos. (pgs 118-119) But
Kennedy liked the proposal. And in the spring of 1962 he instructed McNamara to
initiate a plan to withdraw American forces from South Vietnam. In May of 1962,
McNamara told the commanders on the scene to begin to plan for this as the president
wanted to see the blueprint as soon as it was ready.
To put it mildly, the military dragged its heels. It took them a year to prepare the
outline. In the meantime Kennedy was telling a number of friends and acquaintances
that he was getting out of Vietnam. Douglass assembles quite an impressive list of
witnesses to this fact: White House aide Malcolm Kilduff, journalist Larry Newman,
Sen. Wayne Morse, Marine Corps Chief David Shoup, Canadian Prime Minister Lester
Pearson, Asst. Sec. of State Roger Hilsman, Sen. Mike Mansfield, Congressman Tip
O'Neill, and newspaper editor Charles Bartlett, among others. Mansfield, for one, wrote
that Kennedy had become unequivocal on the subject of withdrawal by the end of 1962.
(p. 124)
In May of 1963, at the so-called SecDef meeting in Honolulu, the generals in Vietnam
finally presented their withdrawal plan. McNamara said it was too slow. He wanted it
revised and speeded up. In September, Kennedy and McNamara announced the order --
NSAM 263 -- to begin the withdrawal. It consisted of the first thousand troops to be out
by the end of the year. Which, of course, would be reversed almost immediately after
his death. (See Probe, Vol. 5 No. 3 p. 18.)
The parallel story that Douglass tells -- with grim skill and painful detail -- is of the
tragic demise of the Nhu brothers. It is the clearest and most moving synopsis of that sad
tale that I can recall. It begins in May of 1963 with the famous bombing of the Hue radio
station during a Buddhist holiday. A Buddhist rally was in progress there to protest
another discriminatory edict passed by the Catholic Diem. The importance of this
bombing, and the subsequent firing into the crowd--which left seven dead and fifteen
wounded--cannot be minimized. As many commentators have noted, this localized
incident mushroomed into a full-blown political crisis, spawning huge strikes and large
street demonstrations. The twin explosions that shook the building were first blamed on
the Viet Cong. Then on the South Vietnamese police. Which enraged the Buddhist
population against Diem even further since his brother Nhu was in charge of the security
forces. It was a milestone in the collapse of faith by the State Department in Diem. And
it eventually led them to back the coup of the generals against the Nhu brothers.
What Douglass does here is introduce a new analysis based on evidence developed at the
scene. Because of the particular pattern of destruction on both the building and the
victims, the local doctors and authorities came to the conclusion that it had to have been
caused by a certain plastic explosive -- which only the CIA possessed at the time. A
further investigation by a Vietnamese newspaper located the American agent who
admitted to the bombing. (p. 131) This puts the event in a new context. Douglass then
builds on this in a most interesting and compelling manner.
As mentioned above, the Hue atrocity caused even the liberals in the State Department
to abandon Diem. So now Harriman and Hilsman united with the conservative hawks in
an effort to oust him. In late August, they manipulated Kennedy into approving a cable
that gave the go-ahead to a group of South Vietnamese generals to explore the
possibility of a coup. (Afterwards, at least one high staffer offered to resign over
misleading Kennedy about McNamara's previous approval of the cable.) The leading
conservative mounting the effort to dethrone Diem was Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy
had planned to recall Ambassador Nolting and appoint Edmund Gullion to the position.
And, as readers of the Mahoney book will know, Gullion was much more in tune with
Kennedy's thinking on Third World nationalism. He had actually tutored him on the
subject in 1951 when Congressman Kennedy first visited Saigon. But Secretary of State
Dean Rusk overruled this appointment, and suggested Lodge for the job. Lodge lobbied
hard for the position because he wanted to use it as a springboard for a run for the
presidency in 1964.
Many, including myself, have maintained that if there was a black-hatted villain in the
drama of Saigon and the Nhu brothers in 1963, it was Lodge. Douglass makes an
excellent case for that thesis here. Before moving to Saigon, Lodge consulted with, of all
people, Time-Life publisher Henry Luce. He went to him for advice on what his
approach to Diem should be. (p. 163) Kennedy's foe Luce advised Lodge not to
negotiate with Diem. Referring him to the work of a journalist in his employ, he told
Lodge to engage Diem in a "game of chicken". What this meant was that unless Diem
capitulated on every point of contention between the two governments, support would
be withdrawn. The ultimate endgame would be that there would be nothing to prop up
his rule. And this is what Lodge did. With disastrous results.
From the time of the August cable, Lodge plotted with CIA officer Lucien Conein to
encourage the coup and to undermine Diem by ignoring him. Even though, as Douglass
makes clear, this is contrary to what JFK wanted. Kennedy grew so frustrated with
Lodge that he sent his friend Torby McDonald on a secret mission to tell Diem that he
must get rid of his brother Nhu. (p. 167)
It was Lodge who got John McCone to withdraw CIA station chief John Richardson who
was sympathetic to Diem. Lodge wanted McCone to replace him with Ed Lansdale.
Why? Because Lansdale was more experienced in changing governments. Richardson
was withdrawn but no immediate replacement was named. So in September of 1963, this
essentially left Lodge and Conein in charge of the CIA's interaction with the generals.
And it was Conein who had been handling this assignment from the beginning, even
before Lodge got on the scene. Around this time, stories began to emanate from Saigon
by journalists Richard Starnes and Arthur Krock about the CIA being a power that was
accountable to no one.
It was Lodge, along with establishment journalist Joe Alsop -- who would later help
convince Johnson to create the Warren Commission -- who began the stories about Diem
negotiating a secret treaty with Ho Chi Minh. (p. 191) This disclosure -- looked upon as
capitulation-- further encouraged the efforts by the military for a coup. In September,
Kennedy accidentally discovered that the CIA had cut off the Commodity Import
Program for South Vietnam. He was taken aback. He knew this would do two things:
1.) It would send the South Vietnamese economy into a tailspin, and 2.) It would further
encourage the generals because it would convey the message the USA was abandoning
Diem. (p. 195)
On October 24th, the conspirators told Conein the coup was imminent. JFK told Lodge
he wanted to be able to stop the coup at the last minute. (Conein later testified that he
was getting conflicting cables from Washington: the State Department was telling him to
proceed, the Kennedys were telling him to stop.) At this time Diem told Lodge he
wanted Kennedy to know he was ready to carry out his wishes. (p. 202) But Lodge did
not relay this crucial message to Kennedy until after the coup began.
The rest of Douglass' work here confirms what was only suggested in the Church
Committee Report. Clearly, Conein and Lodge had sided with the generals to the
ultimate degree. And, like Lenin with the Romanov family, the generals had decided that
Diem and his brother had to be terminated. Lodge and Conein helped the coup plotters
to facilitate the final bloody outcome. In turn, by using the Alsop-Lodge story about the
Diem/Ho negotiations, the CIA egged on the murderous denouement. (p. 209) Not
knowing Lodge was subverting Kennedy's actual wishes, Diem kept calling the
ambassador even after the coup began. This allowed Lodge to supply his true location
to Conein after the brothers had fled the bombed presidential castle. So when the
brothers walked out of the Catholic Church they had taken refuge in, they thought the
truck that awaited them was escorting them to the airport. But with the help of their two
American allies, the generals had arranged for the truck themselves. And the
unsuspecting Nhu brothers walked into the hands of their murderers.
Kennedy was so distraught by this outcome he decided to recall Lodge and fire him. He
had arranged to do this on November 24th. Instead, President Johnson called the
ambassador back with a different message: the US must not lose in Vietnam. (p. 375)
These are the best twin summaries on Kennedy's 1963 Vietnam and Cuba policies that I
have seen between the covers of one book. After his death, the negotiations with Cuba
would disappear forever. And, with even more alacrity, Lyndon Johnson now embarked
on an escalation into a disastrous war in Southeast Asia whose price, even today, is
incalculable. Douglass makes a convincing case that neither would have occurred if
JFK had lived. I leave it to the reader to decide whether those two irrevocable
alterations directly and negatively impacted the lives of tens of millions in America,
Cuba, and Southeast Asia.
IV
Generally speaking, Douglass has done a good job of choosing some of the better
evidence that has appeared of late to indicate a conspiracy. What he does with Ruth and
Michael Paine, especially the former, is salutary.
Michael Paine did not just work at Bell Helicopter. He did not just have a security
clearance there. His stepfather, Arthur Young, invented the Bell helicopter. His mother,
Ruth Forbes Paine Young, was descended from the Boston Brahmin Forbes family --
one of the oldest in America. She was a close friend of Mary Bancroft. Mary Bancroft
worked with Allen Dulles as a spy during World War II in Switzerland. This is where
Dulles got many of his ideas on espionage, which he would incorporate as CIA Director
under Eisenhower. Bancroft also became Dulles' friend and lover. She herself called
Ruth Forbes, "a very good friend of mine." (p. 169) This may explain why, according to
Walt Brown, the Paines were the most oft-questioned witnesses to appear before the
Commission.
Ruth Paine's father was William Avery Hyde. Ruth described him before the Warren
Commission as an insurance underwriter. (p. 170) But there was more to it than that. Just
one month after the Warren Report was issued, Mr. Hyde received a three-year
government contract from the Agency for International Development (AID). He became
their regional adviser for all of Latin America. As was revealed in the seventies, AID
was riddled with CIA operatives. To the point that some called it an extension of the
Agency. Hyde's reports were forwarded both to the State Department and the CIA. (Ibid)
Ruth Paine's older sister was Sylvia Hyde Hoke. Sylvia was living in Falls Church,
Virginia in 1963. Ruth stayed with Sylvia in September of 1963 while traveling across
country. (p. 170) Falls Church adjoins Langley, which was then the new headquarters of
the Central Intelligence Agency, a prized project of Allen Dulles. It was from Falls
Church that Ruth Paine journeyed to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald, who she
had been introduced to by George DeMohrenschildt. After she picked Marina up, she
deposited her in her home in Irving, Texas. Thereby separating Marina from Lee at the
time of the assassination.
Some later discoveries made Ruth's itinerary in September quite interesting. It turned out
that John Hoke, Sylvia's husband, also worked for AID. And her sister Sylvia worked
directly for the CIA itself. By the time of Ruth's visit, Sylvia had been employed by the
Agency for eight years. In regards to this interestingly timed visit to her sister, Jim
Garrison asked Ruth some pointed questions when she appeared before a grand jury in
1968. He first asked her if she knew her sister had a file that was classified at that time
in the National Archives. Ruth replied she did not. In fact, she was not aware of any
classification matter at all. When the DA asked her if she had any idea why it was being
kept secret, Ruth replied that she didn't. Then Garrison asked Ruth if she knew which
government agency Sylvia worked for. The uninquiring Ruth said she did not know. (p.
171) This is the same woman who was seen at the National Archives pouring through
her files in 1976, when the House Select Committee was gearing up.
When Marina Oswald was called before the same grand jury, a citizen asked her if she
still associated with Ruth Paine. Marina replied that she didn't. When asked why not,
Marina stated that it was upon the advice of the Secret Service. She then elaborated on
this by explaining that they had told her it would look bad if the public found out the
"connection between me and Ruth and CIA." An assistant DA then asked, "In other
words, you were left with the distinct impression that she was in some way connected
with the CIA?" Marina replied simply, "Yes." (p. 173)
Douglass interpolates the above with the why and how of Oswald ending up on the
motorcade route on 11/22/63. Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission
testified to having called the Paine household at about the time Oswald was referred by
Ruth -- via a neighbor-- to the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) for a position. He
called and was told Oswald was not there. He left a message for Oswald to come down
and see him since he had a position available as a cargo handler at a regional cargo
airline. Interestingly, this job paid about 1/3 more than the job Oswald ended up with at
the TSBD. He called again the next day to inquire about Oswald and the position again.
He was now told that Lee had already taken a job. Ruth was questioned about the
Adams call by the Warren Commission's Albert Jenner. At first she denied ever hearing
of such a job offer. She said, "I do not recall that." (p. 172) She then backtracked, in a
tactical way. She now said that she may have heard of the offer from Lee. This, of
course, would seem to contradict both the Adams testimony and common sense. If
Oswald was cognizant of the better offer, why would he take the lower paying job?
In addition to his work on the true background of the Paines, which I will return to later,
Douglass' section on the aborted plot against Kennedy in Chicago is also exceptional.
The difference between what Douglass does here and what was done in Ultimate
Sacrifice is the difference between confusion and comprehension. After they were
informed of a plot, the police arrested Thomas Vallee on a pretext. Interestingly Dan
Groth, the suspicious officer in on the arrest of Vallee, was later part of the SWAT team
that assassinated Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969. (p. 204) Groth
took several lengthy leaves from Chicago to Washington for special training under the
auspices of the FBI and CIA. Groth never had a regular police assignment, but always
worked counter-intelligence, with an early focus on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
(Ibid)
Thomas Vallee, the presumed patsy, is just as interesting. The Chicago version of
Oswald had suffered a severe concussion during the Korean War. It was so debilitating,
he was discharged and then collected disability payments. When he got home he was in
a bad car crash and suffered serious head injuries, which caused him to slip into a two-
month coma. (p. 205) He was later diagnosed as mentally disturbed with elements of
schizophrenia and paranoia. The CIA later recruited him to train Cuban exiles to
assassinate Castro. It was these connections which probably helped maneuver him to be
in a warehouse overlooking President Kennedy's parade route for a scheduled visit to the
Windy City. After his arrest, and the cancellation of the early November visit, the police
tried to track down his license plate. They found out they couldn't. (p. 203) The
information was "locked". Only the FBI could "unlock" it.
I should also note the author's probing of the enduring mystery of Carl Mather and
Collins Radio. This originates from the sighting of an Oswald double about ten minutes
and eight blocks from his arrest at the Texas Theater. Around 2:00 PM, auto mechanic
T. F. White noticed a Ford Falcon that first drove past, and then parked oddly in the lot
of El Chico Restaurant. Which was across the street from White's garage. He told his
boss about the man in the car who seemed to be hiding. White walked over to get a
closer look. About ten yards away from the car, he stopped as the man in the white T-
shirt looked right at him. (p. 295) Before he left the lot, he wrote down the license plate
number of the car. When he went home that night and saw Oswald's face on TV, he told
his wife that this was the man he saw in the Falcon.
Local Dallas broadcaster and future mayor Wes Wise heard about White's experience.
When he interviewed him, White gave him the license number. Wise called the FBI.
The Bureau traced the license to one Carl Mather of Garland, Texas. But the license
number was on Mather's Plymouth, not a Falcon.
Mather did high-security communications work for Collins Radio, a major contractor for
the CIA. How major and sensitive? Collins had outfitted raider ships for sabotage
missions off the coast of Cuba. They also installed communication towers in Vietnam.
Further, Mather had installed electronics equipment on Air Force Two. (p. 297) After
Wise's call, the Bureau wanted to talk to Mather. But Mather didn't want to talk to the
Bureau. So they talked to his wife Barbara. She surprised the G-men by saying her
husband had been a close friend of J. D. Tippit. How close? When Tippit was shot, his
wife phoned them. Many years later, the HSCA also wanted to talk to Mather. He didn't
want to talk to them either. They persisted. He relented upon one condition: he wanted
a grant of immunity from prosecution. But he still had no explanation for how his
license ended up on a car with an Oswald double in it right after Oswald's arrest. This is
all interesting, even engrossing, on its own. But the author takes it further. Citing the
valuable work of John Armstrong, he then builds a case that there were two Oswalds at
the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963. One was arrested and taken out the front
door. The second Oswald was hiding in the balcony and later escorted out the back by
the police. Before anyone gets too dismissive, there are two Dallas Police Department
reports that refer to Oswald being in the balcony of the theater. (p. 293) And there
are two witnesses who saw an Oswald lookalike escorted out the rear: Butch Burroughs
and Bernard Haire. (I should add here, in a 4/8/08 interview I did with Armstrong for
this review, he said there was a sheriff's officer who also saw this second Oswald on the
stairs between the mezzanine and the first floor.) The author postulates that the man who
exited the rear is the man who ended up in the Falcon. He then wraps this up by saying
that this double was ultimately flown out of Dallas on a military transport plane. This is
based on the testimony of retired Air Force officer Robert Vinson. It is contained in a
52-page affidavit given to his attorney James P. Johnston of Wichita, Kansas.
I would like to conclude this section by noting Douglass' attention to the pain and
suffering inflicted upon those who have tried to tell the truth as they knew it about the
JFK case. Their only misfortune being that what they saw and knew was not conducive
to the Warren Commission's mythology.
Most of us are aware of what happened to Richard Case Nagell. How he was railroaded
and incarcerated after he was arrested in El Paso, Texas on September 20, 1963. (pgs.
152-158) But Douglass sheds light on what happened to three other important
witnesses. Jim Wilcott and his wife worked for the Agency out of the Tokyo station. On
the day of the assassination, Wilcott pulled a 24-hour security shift. That evening, more
than one employee told him that the CIA had to have been involved in Kennedy's
killing. When Wilcott asked how they knew this, the response was that they had handled
disbursements for him under a cryptonym. Also, he had been trained by the Agency as a
double agent at Atsugi. (pgs. 146-147) Later, both Jim and his wife quit the Agency.
They then went public with their knowledge. Jim lost his private sector job, started
receiving threatening phone calls, and had the tires on his car slashed.
Abraham Bolden was a Secret Service agent who had asked to leave the White House in
1961. He did not care for the lackadaisical practices of the White House detail. (p. 200)
On October 30, 1963 Bolden was in Chicago when the local agents were briefed on what
they knew about an attempt being planned on JFK's life there. After Vallee's arrest and
the foiling of the plot, Bolden felt a foreboding about Kennedy's upcoming trip to
Dallas. When Kennedy was killed, Bolden noted the similarities between what had
occurred in Dallas and what almost occurred in Chicago. In May of 1964 he was in
Washington for a Secret Service training program. (p. 215) He tried to contact the
Warren Commission about what he knew. The day after his call to J. Lee Rankin, he
was sent back to Chicago. Upon his arrival he was arrested. The pretense was that he
was trying to sell Secret Service files to a counterfeiter. Upon his arraignment he was
formally charged with fraud, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. (Ibid) Needless to
say, Bolden was convicted based upon perjured testimony. (The phony witness later
admitted this himself.) He was imprisoned at Springfield where he was placed in a
psychiatric unit. (p. 216) He was given mind-numbing drugs. But other inmates alerted
him to the nature of the drugs in advance. So he knew how to fake taking the pills.
While in prison, his family endured a bombing of their home, setting fire to their garage,
and a sniper shooting through their window. Mark Lane, while working for Garrison,
visited him in 1967. Lane then wrote about Bolden's knowledge of the plot in Chicago.
When the prison authorities learned about this, they placed Bolden in solitary
confinement. He was finally released in 1969.
Compared to the fate of Ralph Yates, Bolden did all right. On November 20, 1963 Yates
was making his rounds as a refrigerator mechanic for the Texas Butcher Supply
Company in Dallas. That morning he picked up a hitchhiker on the R. L. Thornton
Expressway. The man had a package with him that was wrapped in brown paper. When
Yates asked him if he would prefer to place it in the back of the pickup, the passenger
said no. They were curtain rods and he would rather keep them in the cab. (p. 351) The
conversation rolled around to the subject of Kennedy's upcoming visit. The man asked
Yates if he thought it was possible to kill Kennedy while he was there. Yates said that
yes, it was possible. The hitchhiker then asked if Yates knew the motorcade route. Yates
said he did not, but it had been in the paper. The man asked if he thought it would now
be changed. Yates said that he doubted it. The passenger asked to be let off at a stoplight
near Elm and Houston. Yates then returned to his shop and told his colleague Dempsey
Jones about the strange conversation. (p. 352)
After the assassination, Yates noted the hitchhiker's resemblance to Oswald. So he
volunteered his experience with him to the FBI. They brought him back for a total of
four interviews. It became clear they did not want to believe him. The reason being that
Oswald was not supposed to be on the expressway at that time. They finally gave him a
polygraph test. The agents then told Yates' wife that, according to the machine, her
husband was telling the truth. But, they concluded, the reason was that "he had
convinced himself that he was telling the truth. So that's how it came out." (p. 354) The
FBI told Yates that he needed help. So they sent him to Woodlawn Hospital, where he
was admitted as a psychiatric patient. To quote the author, "From that point on, he spent
the remaining eleven years of his life as a patient in and out of mental health hospitals. "
(Ibid) Such was the price for disturbing the equilibrium of the official story.
V
In this last section, I want to tie together four strands Douglass deals with. I also want to
suggest how they fit together not just in a conspiratorial design, but a design against this
particular president.
In addition to his elucidation of the Castro/Kennedy back channel, Douglass also deals
with Kennedy's back channel to Khrushchev. Kennedy had gotten off to a rocky start
with the Russians because of the Bay of Pigs debacle and the roughness of the 1961
Vienna summit. But toward the end of 1961, he and the Russian premier had established
a secret correspondence. The first letter was delivered by Georgi Bolshakov to Pierre
Salinger wrapped in a newspaper. (p. 23) Khrushchev seemed to be trying to tell
Kennedy that although he may have seemed unreasonable in Vienna, he was dead set
against going down a path to war that would lead to the death of millions. The letter was
26 pages long, and Khrushchev mentioned hot spots on the globe like Laos and Berlin.
Kennedy dutifully responded. And the correspondence went on for a year. It was then
supplemented by two unlikely cohorts: Pope John XXIII, and Saturday Review editor
Norman Cousins. Cousins had been the intermediary between John and the premier.
When Kennedy heard of this, he decided to have Cousins carry messages to Khrushchev
for him also. In fact, it seems that it was actually Cousins who provided the impetus for
Kennedy to make his remarkable American University speech of June 10, 1963. (p. 346)
This speech is one of the centerpieces of the book. Douglass prints it in its entirety as an
appendix. (pgs. 382-388) He also analyzes it at length in the text. (pgs. 41-45)
Khrushchev was ecstatic about the speech. He called it, "the greatest speech by any
American president since Roosevelt." (p. 45) So inspired was he that he countered the
speech and the renewed correspondence in multiple terms: 1.) A limited test ban treaty
2.) A non-aggression treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and 3.) He encouraged
Castro in his back channel with Kennedy. Douglass places much importance on the last
and he uses Russian sources, including Khrushchev's son, to bolster it. (pgs 68-69)
There was another person at the time tiring of the Cold War and his role in it. Except he
had a much lower profile than the four luminaries depicted above. His name was Lee
Harvey Oswald. As Marina once said, Oswald "liked and approved of the President and
he believed that for the United States in 1963, John F. Kennedy was the best president
the country could hope to have." (p. 331) At the New Orleans Public Library, he checked
out William Manchester's profile of JFK,Portrait of a President, Kennedy's own Profiles
in Courage,and a book called The White Nile. The last he read only because Manchester
noted that Kennedy had read it recently. (Ibid) When Kennedy spoke on the radio about
the test ban treaty, Lee listened intently and told Marina that he was making an appeal
for disarmament. Curiously, he also informed his wife that Kennedy would actually like
to pursue a more gentle policy with Cuba. But unfortunately he was not free to do so at
the time. Doesn't sound like the Krazy Kid planning on murdering JFK does it?
The night after Kennedy's test ban speech, Oswald gave a speech of his own at Spring
Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. His cousin, Eugene Murret was a seminarian there
and he invited him to talk about his experiences in the Russian system. Douglass uses
Oswald's notes on the speech to inform us what he was thinking at the time. And, for
the man depicted by the Warren Commission, its extraordinary. Away from New
Orleans, away from his handlers, away from scripted situations arranged by others,
Oswald said some surprising things. He first chided his audience. Sounding like JFK,
the man he admired, he warned them that military coups are not a far away thing in
some banana republic in South America. It could happen here, in the USA, their own
country. (Ibid) Which organization could do such a thing? He said it could not come
from the army, because of its many conscripts, its large and cumbersome structure, its
huge network of bases. Amazingly, he specifically mentioned Kennedy relieving Edwin
Walker of his command as evidence it would not come from there. Walker, the man he
derisively dismisses here, is the man he was already supposed to have tried to shoot!
He then said that from his experience in both Russia and America, "Capitalism doesn't
work, communism doesn't work. In the middle is socialism and that doesn't work
either." (p. 473) He concluded that by returning to the USA, he was choosing the lesser
of two evils. This does not remotely suggest the ideological zealot debating Ed Butler
about the merits of Marxism, who was passing out flyers begging for fair treatment for
Cuba, who got into street fights with anti-Castro Cubans who perceived him as a
defender of Fidel. Here, in a secluded place, many miles away from Clay Shaw, David
Ferrie, and Guy Banister, he sounds like a spy ready to come in from the cold. Ready to
retire to a desk job under the president he admired.
But his handlers weren't ready to retire him just yet. As Ruth Paine left her stay in Falls
Church to head south to pick up Marina, Oswald allegedly embarked on what Philip
Melanson called his Magical Mystery Tour to Mexico. The object of this final charade of
course was to depict Oswald as trying to obtain visas for Cuba and the Soviet Union. As
Douglass describes it, this utterly intriguing journey is multi-layered. What Oswald
seems to think he is doing is the final act of what he did in New Orleans: discrediting
the FPCC. Which had been an operation the CIA had that was ongoing. As John
Newman has pointed out, David Phillips and James McCord were in on it. But there
was also something else going on here. After the fact, the CIA seems to have tried to
create a questionable trail, one that would suggest Oswald was trying to get into contact
with Valery Kostikov. Kostikov worked at the Soviet consulate but was also a KGB
agent who the FBI had discovered was involved in assassination plots. (p. 76) But as the
author demonstrates here, the record of this trip is so fraught with inconsistencies,
improbabilities, conflicting testimony and outright deception that it "inadvertently
revealed more about the CIA" than about Oswald. (p. 75)
The author notes the witnesses at the Cuban embassy who could not identify the man
they saw as Oswald. Using the fine work of Newman, Douglass shows that at least some
of the calls attributed to Oswald are dubious. (p. 76) He also adroitly notes that, prior to
the assassination, the CIA held this alleged Kostikov/Oswald association close to its
vest. If they had not, then it is highly probable that Oswald would not have been on the
president's motorcade route on 11/22. Which, shortly after his return, was insured by the
Paines not telling Oswald about the other job offer. Douglass astutely relates the final
way his presence there was ultimately clinched. A man at the Bureau, Marvin
Gheesling, deactivated Oswald's FLASH warning on 10/9/63. This meant that Oswald
was not placed on the Security Index in Dallas. Again, if he would have been on this list,
it is very likely the Secret Service would have had him under surveillance prior to
November 22nd. Hoover was furious when he found out what Gheesling had done. He
had him censured and placed on probation. On the documents censuring him he wrote,
"Yes, send this guy to Siberia!" (p. 178) Later, on the marginalia of another document,
he wrote that the Bureau should not trust the CIA again because of the phony story the
Agency had given them about Oswald in Mexico City. (Ibid)
As others have noted, the combination of Oswald moving around so much plus the late-
breaking, dubious, but explosive details of the Mexico City trip, all caused the system to
overload in the wake of the JFK assassination. On November 23rd, after talking to
Hoover by phone and John McCone in person, Johnson was quite clear about his fear of
nuclear war. He told his friend Richard Russell that the question of Kennedy's murder
had to be removed from the Mexico City arena. Why? Because "they're testifying that
Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty
million Americans in an hour." (p. 231) The manufactured trail in Mexico helped freeze
any real attempt to search for the actual facts of this case. It was too dangerous. And
there was a second built-in element that curtailed any real investigation. The fact that the
FBI was short changed on information about Oswald -- by the files not getting from
New Orleans to Dallas quickly enough, and by the CIA withholding crucial information
about Oswald in Mexico City -- this helped pitch the Bureau into a CYA mode. For
clearly, their surveillance of Oswald had been faulty. His activities in New Orleans, his
alleged attempts to contact Kostikov in Mexico, his threatening message left at the
Dallas FBI office, all of these should have put him on the Security Index.
But as Donald Gibson has noted, the safety valve to all this soon emerged. First, Jock
Whitney's New York Herald Tribune put out the cover story about a disturbed Oswald
being a "crazed individual" with "homicidal fantasies". (Probe, Vol. 7 No. 1 p. 19) This,
of course, began to detract from the Oswald as the Marxist-motivated, Kostikov-
employed assassin. It created a new profile for Oswald. He was now the lonely and
disturbed sociopath. As Gibson further showed, a day after this, the lobbying effort of
Eugene Rostow, Dean Acheson, and Joe Alsop would convince Johnson to create the
Warren Commission. (Probe, Vol. 3 No. 4 p. 8) And at one of its very early meetings,
Allen Dulles passed out a book promoting this particular view of American
assassinations.
If all Douglass had written about the technique of the cover-up was the above, he would
have done a salutary and exceptional job. But he has gone further. And this makes his
writing on the subject both new and even more valuable. Carol Hewett once wrote a
quite interesting article (Probe,Vol. 4 No. 3) about how Ruth Paine "discovered"
Oswald's alleged letter to the Russian embassy in Washington. The date of this letter is
November 9th. In the letter Oswald writes about "recent events" in Mexico with a man
he calls Comrade Kostin. (This has usually been taken to mean Kostikov, although
Hewett pointed out that there actually was a Soviet agent named Kostin.) Oswald went
on to write, "I had not planned to contact the Soviet embassy in Mexico so they were
unprepared, had I been able to reach the Soviet embassy in Havana as planned, the
embassy there would have had time to complete our business." (p. 228, Douglass'
italics.) The author comments, "here the letter deepens the Soviet involvement in the
plot and extends the complicity to Cuba." In other words, "the business" would have
been part of a co-conspiracy between the two communist countries. Further, Oswald
betrayed knowledge in the letter that Eusebio Azcue, an employee at the Cuban
consulate, had been replaced. But this did not happen until November 18 --the day the
letter arrived at the Soviet embassy. How Oswald knew this would happen in advance
has never been adequately explained.
In his call to Johnson on November 23rd, Hoover mentioned the letter. But he played
down its more explosive and conspiratorial elements. (p. 229) But it was not until 1999,
when Boris Yeltsin turned over long-secret documents to President Clinton, that we got
the contemporaneous Soviet reaction to the arrival of this letter. The Soviet diplomats
considered it a clear provocation against them. (p. 230) They also considered it a
deception, since they had no such ties to Oswald. They also noted it was typed yet other
letters that he wrote to them were handwritten. They thus concluded it was a forgery. Or
perhaps someone had dictated it to him--perhaps as a completion of the FPCC counter-
intelligence operation. But most significantly, the Soviets felt the letter was "concocted
by those ... involved in the President's assassination." (p. 230) To disown it, they turned
it over to the State Department on November 26th.
But, by then, the FBI already had two copies of the letter. One from a mail intercept
program and one via Ruth Paine. Ruth Paine gave FBI agent Jim Hosty her handwritten
copy of the letter on November 23rd. As Hewett pointed out, how and why she copied
this letter was a matter of a long colloquy spread over three days between her and the
Warren Commission. Altogether, she gave three different reasons as to why she copied
the letter. She finally decided on this: since Oswald left it on her secretary desk,
he must have wanted her to read it! The shifting and unconvincing excuses all seem a
way to disguise and obfuscate one simple but revealing fact: she was spying on Oswald.
And this spying went as far as copying his private correspondence without his
permission. (For who she is spying and why is, of course, never broached.) Further, her
copy of the letter differs in some interesting ways from the typewritten one. As the
author notes, it de-emphasizes Oswald's contacts with the communist embassies.
Instead, it emphasizes his differences with the FBI. It also replaces the pregnant phrase
"time to complete our business" with phrases like "time to assist me" referring to a travel
process. (p. 233) Amazingly, it was this Ruth Paine version of the letter -- not the one
Oswald allegedly typed and mailed -- that the Warren Commission used in its analysis of
what the correspondence meant. The Commission then returned Oswald's rough draft,
the one Ruth copied, not to Marina, but to Ruth. According to Carol Hewett, Ruth's
handwritten copy is nowhere to be found today. (Hewett interview, 4/8/08)
There are many fascinating aspects to Ruth Paine's role with this letter. So many that
one could write a lengthy essay about it. One thing I wish to point out here. The FBI
could not make their version of the letter public since it would have revealed their
intercept program. Clearly, the State Department did not want to reveal their version.
Because by November 26th, Johnson had decided to bury the allegations about Oswald
in Mexico City to avoid the threat of conflagration. But by Ruth Paine's spying on
Oswald, it was possible to circulate a softer version of the letter, thus further labeling
him a communist who had problems with American authority. Douglass has finally
brought this episode, and Ruth Paine's role in it, into bold relief.
I do have some reservations about the book. Let me note them briefly. Douglass, like
several others before him, couldn't resist mentioning and misinterpreting David Morales'
remarks as quoted by Gaeton Fonzi in The Last Investigation.(p. 57) Second, he places
more faith in some assassination witnesses than I do, e.g. Ed Hoffmann. And I disagree
with his characterization of JFK as a 'cold warrior" who "turned" during the Missile
Crisis. If Kennedy was actually a cold warrior when he entered office, he would have
sent in the Navy and Marines to complete the job at the Bay of Pigs. Which is what a
real cold warrior, Richard Nixon, told him to do. He also would have sent combat troops
into Vietnam in 1961, when all of his advisers said it was necessary.
But overall, and overwhelmingly, this is a rich, rewarding, and reverberating book. One
that does two things that very few volumes in the field do: it both illuminates and
empowers the reader. I strongly recommend purchasing it. It is the best book in the
field since Breach of Trust.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

JFK and the Unspeakable review

Review by COPA member Bill Kely,http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/07/jfk-and-
unspeakable.html
JFK And the Unspeakable Why He Died & Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008), by James
Douglas.
As a sensitive and serious subject, the assassination of President Kennedy has been
approached from many different ways by journalists, historians, psychologists, witnesses and
even suspects who have acknowledged their roles in a conspiracy.
But James W. Douglas comes down a very different and spiritual path.
A Catholic theologian, anti-war activist, conscientious objector and peace activist, Doublas
was slow to connect the death of the President with the constant threat of war, but he did with
the help of Thomas Merton, a monk who had attended Cambridge and Columbia.
Merton, whose autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, has been compared to the
Confessions of Saint Augustine, thought deeply and wrote often about war and racism
(including Peace in the Post-Christian Era), until he was banned from doing so by his order.
The prohibition led him to conduct lengthy correspondence with a wide variety of people,
including RFKs wife Ethel Kennedy, Clare Booth Luce, Evora Arca de Sardinia, wife of a Bay
of Pigs commander, and Douglas.
The Unspeakable, according to Douglas, is a term Thomas Merton coined at the heart of
the sixties after JFKs assassination in the midst of the escalating Vietnam war, the nuclear
arms race, and the further assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert
Kennedy. In each of those soul-shaking events, Merton sensed an evil whose depth and deceit
seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.
One of the awful facts of our age, wrote Merton in 1965, is the evidence that [the world] is
stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable.
The Vietnam War, the race to a global war, and the interlocking murders of John Kennedy,
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were all signs of the Unspeakable,
explains Douglas. It remains deeply present in our world.
Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care
not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is
what too few are willing to see.
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; wrote
Merton, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very
moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the
abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his
obedience
In one his letters, Merton even foresaw Kennedys murder when he wrote, I have little
confidence in Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and
lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity thats needed. Too much the
Time and Life mentality,What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the
politicians dont have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and
compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication.
Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are long
marked out for assassination.
And Douglas argues, Kennedy did have an epiphany, a sudden (or maybe it was a slow and
gradual) realization that war could not be fought on the same terms as it was before because
of the development of nuclear weapons. Douglas had his own epiphany when he realized that
JFKs conflicts with his own generals and administrators led to his death, the why of his
assassination. And now he wants to do something about it.
When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood the process, says Douglas,
the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the Unspeakable.
For Douglas, as with most of us, we would prefer not to confront the Unspeakable, but
Douglas goes into their Nest, and in this book he reports back what he found there.
By overlooking the deep changes in Kennedys life and the forces behind his death, I
contributed to a national climate of denial, he writes. Our collective denial to the obvious, in
the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas
cover-up. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent
murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work
in our government and in ourselves. Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed
four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based, first
of all, on denial not the governments but our own. The unspeakable is not far away.
The unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government
that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and
compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the governments
doctrine of plausible deniability. John Kennedys assassination is rooted in our denial of our
nations crimes in World War II that began the Cold War and the nuclear arms raceBy
avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who
failed to confront the Unspeakable opened the door to JFKs assassination and its cover-up.
The Unspeakable is not far away.
Most important, notes Douglas, The story of JFK and the Unspeakable is drawn from the
suffering and compassion of many witnesses who saw the truth and spoke it. Douglas
introduces us to those witnesses and lets us hear what they have to say. In living the truth, we
are liberated from the Unspeakable.
With his chronological time line, and compare and contrast style, Douglas shows that the
assassination of President Kennedy was not the work of one lone, deranged gunman, or the
act of Cubans, mobsters or renegade government agents, but whatever happened at Dealey
Plaza it was a well planned and executed coup detat.
By chronologically comparing and contrasting the lives and experiences of Kennedy and his
accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Douglas reasonably demonstrates that Oswald was not
the lone nut loser that Warren Commission apologists portray, but an active player in the big
game, though only as a pawn and patsy.
According to Douglas, the paths that led Oswald and Kennedy to Dealey Plaza were divergent
but pushed along by the same hidden forces, with the motive for the assassination found with
Kennedy rather than in the mind of his accused assassin.
Like David Talbots book Brothers before him, Douglas reframes the Kennedy presidency to
include the backstage manipulations that weve only recently learned about.
The conflicts with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff during and after
the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with the racists in his own party fighting the civil rights revolt,
as well as his determination to withdraw from Vietnam and establish a dialog and diplomatic
resolution to the Cuban problem, were all forces that set Kennedy up for retaliation by those
who made the Unspeakable happen.
Kennedy, more than once, reflected that a Seven Days in May style military coup could occur
in the United States if there was a Bay of Pigs type conflict, and then another similar situation,
like the Cuban Missile Crisis presented. Then, if there was a third Bay of Pigs type event,
Kennedy reasoned, a coup was possible.
Douglas says that Kennedys third Bay of Pigs was his Peace Speech at American
University on June 10, 1963, which he reproduces in full as an appendix.
But while being threatening to the military-industrial complex, the American University
speech was not the straw that broke the camels back if you believe (as I do) that Col. Jose
Rivera (USAR) had expressed foreknowledge of the assassination and of Oswalds patsy role,
as early as mid-April, 1963, months before the Peace Speech.
Douglas starts out with a brief, but incomplete chronology at the beginning, but then jumps
around a little in his six chapters, each dealing with various people and events that lead up to
what happened at Dealey Plaza.
In his first chapter, A Cold Warrior Turns, Douglas show how JFKs slow evolving epiphany
brings him to the realization that war is not the answer, and he turns to backchannel
diplomacy when his own administration balks at talking with the enemy (does this sound
familiar?).
If the Presidents assassin was a real psychotic, lone-nut, spree killer, as the official story
makes him out to be, then it could all be explained psychotically, like other real psycho spree
killers (Howard Unruh for instance), and it would be disjointed from the real world that the
victim inhabited.
But if that lone assassin is Lee Harvey Oswald, then his background, history, personal profile
and every attribute we know about him, as well as his associates, indicate that he was a covert
intelligence operative affiliated with a domestic, federal intelligence agency/network. (One
that is still in operation, I might add BK)
Oswalds background fits like a glove into to the covert history of the Cold War, as Douglas so
artfully demonstrates by zig zagging the lives of Kennedy, the King, and Oswald, the Pawn,
showing how hidden hands put the Pawn into position to checkmate the King.
Limiting his chronology from January 17, 1961, when President Eisenhower gave his farewell
address and warned of the military-industrial-complex, and ending at 11:21 AM, November
24, 1963, with the murder of Oswald, Douglas focuses on what he deems necessary to
conclusively show that JFK was the victim, not only of a conspiracy, but a high level coup. And
he succeeds.
Although only 24 years old, Oswald had been involved in at least a half dozen major covert
intelligence operations, beginning with his radar monitoring and guarding of the U2 spy plane
in Japan. On Holloween, October 31, 1959, Oswald turned his passport, which identified him
as an Import Export agent, over to State Department officer Richard Snyder. Oswald
threatened to give the Soviets information he had learned in the Marines. Although there is no
record of Oswald ever being questioned by the KGB, six months after he defected, Gary
Powers was shot down in a U2 over Russia, which forced cancellation of a meeting between
Eisenhower and Kruschev.
Douglas speculates that Oswald did tell them. All that was necessary to know in order to shoot
down a U2, was the speed and altitude of the plane. Gary Powers himself speculated that
Oswald gave the Soviets the information they needed to shoot him down. Oswald, it turns out,
had a US Military ID card identical to the card Powers had on him when he was shot down.
There was also speculation that Oswald was in attendance at Powers trial.
In any case, Oswald was not prosecuted, or even officially debriefed when he returned home
with his Russian wife and baby. George De Mohrenschildt, at the request of the CIAs J.
Walton Moore, met the Oswalds and introduced them to his circle of friends, which included
Ruth and Michael Paine.
While still under the guidance of De Mohrenschildt, in October, 1962, Oswald got a job at the
graphic arts firm Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval, that did work for the Army Security Agency, placing
captions on maps and photographs taken by the U2. So during the Cuban Missile Crisis that
month, when the President held up photos of Cuban missile sites, the man who would be
accused of killing him, may have placed the arrows and captions on those very photographs.
Douglas says that the Oswalds were handed off like a football, from De Mohrenschildt to the
Paines. Douglas says that J. Walton Moore, of the Dallas Domestic Contacts Division of the
CIA had his longtime contact George de Mohrenschildt meet Oswald, saying that sometime in
the summer of 1962 one of Moores associates gave him Oswalds address in Fort Worth, and
de Mohrenschildt called Moore on the phone to confirm the mission.
According to Douglas, it was Moore, of the CIAs Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas who
had De Mohrenschildt befriend Oswald, and it was De Mohrenschildt who arranged for the
Oswalds to meet Ruth and Michael Paine, who became sponsors and benefactors of the
accused assassin and his family.
With the assistance of the Paines, the Oswald family moved to New Orleans in the wake of the
Walker shooing, which was later blamed on Oswald. Going into all the sorid details of Oswald
in New Orleans, Douglas brings out the founding of the Fair Play for Cuba chapter, the run ins
with Carlos Bruingier and the DRE, but doesnt get into the whole Morley vs. CIA over the
Joannides records.
Most important however, Douglas fits in the anti-Castro Cuban training operations, the CIA
maritime raids on Cuba and the backchannel negotiations that were suppose to be secretly
going on between JFK and Castro.
In the Chapter on Kennedy, Castro and the CIA, Douglas writes that, It was while John
Kennedy was being steered into combat with the CIA and the Pentagon at the Bay of Pigs that
Thomas Merton was being blocked from publishing his thoughts on nuclear war by his
monastic superiors. Merton, like Kennedy, decided to find another way. The words pouring
out of Mertons typewriter were spilling over from unpublished manuscripts into his Cold War
letters. (p.17)
On December 31, 1961, Merton wrote a letter anticipating the Cuban Missile Crisis ten
months later. It was addressed to Clare Booth Luce, wife of Time-Life-Fortune owner Henry
Luce, a Cold War media barron, who financially supported the maritime raiders, and wrote
stories about them for Life. (p.18)
As Merton challenged the Cold War dogmas of Clare Booth Luce, he was raising similar
questions of conscience to another powerfully situated women, Ethel Kennedy (p.19) and
Merton began to see a change in Kennedys political thought.
At a speech the president gave at the University of Washington, Kennedy said, It is a curious
fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only
two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either
Red or dead. (p.19)
Douglas says that JFKs fourth Bay of Pigs was the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
and he notes the role Norman Cousins played, and the methodology he used in changing
public opinion on the issue. Douglas notes that the Senate vote on ratification of the treaty,
approved by a vote of 80 19, was held on September 24, not an unimportant date on the
Road to Dallas.
One pawn in the Cold War who needed a way out before it was too late was a young ex-
Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald. In following Kennedys path through a series of critical conflicts,
we have been moving more deeply into the question: Why was John Kennedy murdered? Now
as we begin to trace Oswalds path, which will converge with Kennedys, we can see the
emergence of a strangely complementary question: Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated
and supported by the government he betrayed? (p. 37)
The same government issued a report that described Oswald as unable to establish
meaningful relationships with other people. He was perpetually disconnected with the world
around him. Long before the assassination he expressed his hatred for American society and
acted in protest against it.He sought for himself a place in history a role as the great man
who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times. His commitment to Marxism
and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation. (p.39)
Of course this alleged motive, contrived by the Warren Commission, doesnt take into account
the fact that Oswald, who sought for himself a place in history, denied killing anybody and
claimed to be a patsy.
As Douglas puts it, If we turn from Warren Report psychology to Cold War history, why was
the ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald not arrested and charged a year and a half before the
assassination when he came back to the United States from the Soviet Union, where he had
announced at the American Embassy in Moscow that he would hand over military secrets
(about U2 flights) to the Soviets? (p.39)
Oswalds trajectory, which would end up meeting Kennedys in Dallas, was guided not by the
heavens or fate or even, as the Warren Report would have it, by a disturbed psyche, Oswald
was guided by his intelligence handlers. Lee Harvey Oswald was a pawn in the game. He was a
minor piece in the deadly game Kennedy wanted to end. Oswald was being moved square by
square across a giant board stretching from Atsugi to Moscow to Minsk to Dallas. For the sake
of victory in the Cold War, the hands moving Oswald were prepared to sacrifice him and any
other piece on the board. However, there was one player, John Kennedy, who no longer
believed in the game and was threatening to turn over the board. (p.41)
In the chapter on JFK and Vietnam, Douglas bring in Operation Northwoods, which many
believe was incorporated in the assassination planning.
On March 13, 1962, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Kennedy inherited from
the Eisenhower, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, proposed Operation Northwoods. Its purpose
was to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba, in which a Remember the Main incident could be
arranged in several forms. We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame
Cuba (p.96-97)
Kennedy rejected Northwoods, and his solution to the Vietnam problem was Easy the
president said, Put a government in there that will ask us to leave. (p.134)
In Marked Out for Assassination, Douglas says that, Investigative journalist Joseph Trento
testified in a 1984 court deposition that, according to CIA sources, James Angleton was the
supervisor of a CIA assassination unit in the 1950s. The small assassination team was headed
by Army colonel Boris Pash. At the end of World War II, Army Intelligence colonel Pash had
rounded up Nazi scientists who could contribute their research skills to the development of
U.S. nuclear and chemical weapons (p.143)
Douglas brings out the individual stories of a number of important witnesses, most of whom
we have heard from before, but Boris Pash is one of the few individuals Douglas introduces
who has managed to avoid the limelight, even in death.
Douglas gives much play to James Wilcott (p. 146-148), a CIA accountant stationed in Tokyo
(1960 1964) who claimed that it was common knowledge in the CIA station there that
Oswald was an agent who was disbursed CIA funds from a case officer. Both Wilcott and his
wife were CIA administrators.
In the decade following his HSCA testimony, notes Douglas, Jim Wilcott joined Vietnam
veteran Brian Willson and the Nuremberg Actions community outside the Concord Naval
Weapons Station in nonviolent resistance to weapons shipments to the CIA sponsored Contra
war in Nicaragua. While sitting on the railroad tracks, Willson was run over by a weapons
train, which severed both his legs. Undeterred, Jim Wilcott was arrested for blocking a later
train. (p.147)
Were going to hear more about Mr. Wilcott, but as Douglas surmises, Thus, even the
assassination of a president could be funded unconsciously by American taxpayers and
carried out unknowingly by government employees, while only a few such as CIA Deputy
Director for Plans Richard Helms and Counter-intelligence head James Angleton knew the
intended result beforehand. (p.148)
In Saigon and Chicago (Chapter 5), Douglas reinforces the image of Kennedy losing grip on
his government, especially in Saigon, where his ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was pushing
for a coup to oust Diem, while Kennedy wanted Lodge to use diplomacy.
Its quite apparent, in retrospect that Kennedys attempt at appeasement of conservative
Republicans by appointing two of their own Lodge in Vietnam and John McCone as head of
the CIA, backfired in Kennedys face.
There are a few little gems in The Unspeakable, like Boris Pash, and Marvin Gheesling
(p.177), the FBI agent who, on October 9, 1963, took Oswald off the FLASH notice, effectively
turned off the alarm switch on Oswald literally an instant before it would have gone off.
While the coup in South Vietnam was being undertaken, the FBI and Secret Service were
uncovering a plot to kill the President in Chicago (p.200-207).
Thomas Vallee had been led along a trail that Lee Oswald would follow after him writes
Douglas. The ex-Marine who worked at a CIA sponsored Cuban commando training camp in
Levittown, Long Island. Thomas Arthur Vallee and Lee Harvey Oswald, two men under the
CIAs thumb for years, were being set up, one after the other, as scapegoats in two prime sites
for killing Kennedy. (p.205)
In Chicago, Douglas visits the building on the parade route Kennedy would have used, and
visits the assassins lair where Vallee would have been placed and branded as the assassin if
JFK had gone to Chicago that day. Into the Nest of the Unspeakable.
Douglas makes the point that if Kennedy had been killed in Chicago on November 1, we might
have known Thomas Arthur Vallee as his deranged, ex-Marine, lone-nut assassin rather than
Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald was being systematically set up for his scapegoat role in Dallas, just as
Thomas Arthur Vallee had been set up as an alternative patsy in Chicago, writes Douglas in
Washington and Dallas. Vallee escaped that fate, when two whistleblowers, Chicago Police
Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland an FBI informant named Lee, stopped the Chicago plot.
Oswald was not so fortunate in Dallas. His incrimination by unseen hands continued
(p.221)
Douglas also outlines the original cover story, that is still propagated in some quarters.
Just as Chicago was the model for Dallas, Saigon was the backdrop for Chicago. says
Douglas, indicating a connection between what was going on. The legend created for the
Dallas scenario of the gun-toting malcontent Lee Harvey Oswald followed a similar pattern.
From the claims made by a series of CIA officers to the authors of widely disseminated books
and articles, John Kennedy had been convicted in his grave of having tried to kill Fidel Castro,
whose supposedly deranged surrogate, Lee Harvey Oswald, then retaliated. As a successful
Chicago plot would have done, the Dallas plot ended up blaming the victim. Kennedy tried to
murder Castro, and got what he deserved. (p.218)
Douglas wrote that, Those who designed the plot to kill Kennedy were
familiar with the inner sanctum of our national security state,The assassins
purpose seems to have encompassed not only killing a president determined to
make peace with the enemy but also using his murder as the impetus for a
possible first strike against that same enemy.
The inclusion of Northwoods in the Dealey Plaza operation is the lynchpin that
proves that the bullets that killed the President came from the Pentagon, and
the assassination is the most significant national security issue yet to be
resolved.
Weve come to learn a lot since JFK was buried, and one of the most important
things we should have learned is that the assassination of President Kennedy
was a terrorist attack on our nation, as well as one man, and that we must now,
or eventually, come to face the Unspeakable and confront it with the truth weve
come to know.
As Douglas puts it, Unknown to ordinary citizens watching President Kennedys
funeral on their television sets, the agencies of a national security state had
quickly formed a united front behind the official mourning scenes to cover up
every aspect of JFKs assassination. National security policies toward enemies
beyond the state (with whom the slain president had been negotiating a truce)
made necessary the denial of every trace of conspiracy within the state. As a
saddled, riderless horse followed the coffin through the capitols streets,
plausible deniability had come home to haunt the nation. (p.82)
And now the game tables are being overturned, and what was once kept secret
for reasons of national security, must now be revealed for reasons of national
security, so the Nest of the Unspeakeable can be confronted and purged.
[ William Kelly, co-founder of the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) and a member of
the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) can be reached at bkjfk3@yahoo.com ]