Down the JFK Rabbit Hole

I am a member of several Facebook groups studying the JFK assassination.  We get into some very detailed discussions about the evidence as well as references to various books published on the subject, including the two that I think are basic reading for anyone who wants even a cursory understanding of the event: Mark Lane’s Rush To Judgement  (a deconstruction of everything Warren Commission) and Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins (a blow-by-blow description of his case against Clay L. Shaw in New Orleans, who was tangentially involved in the assassination, as well as of the dirty tricks employed by the CIA to discredit Garrison and his case), but of course there are scads of excellent books on the assassination as well as many eminently worth avoiding.

If you get involved in such Facebook groups and do an enormous amount of reading about the assassination, you discover some evidence that one cannot ignore.  The first piece of such evidence comes from the various videos and photographs that were taken during the actual event and what they reveal.

It is indisputable visual evidence that, after the shots were fired, a great many people at the scene turned toward what became known as the “grassy knoll,” that is, toward the fence at the top of the grassy knoll because that is where they heard a shot come from, and then many of them actually ran up the grassy knoll — we can see this with our own eyes in the videos and photographs.  One police officer, Joseph Smith, jumped the fence and intercepted an individual who pulled out a Secret Service ID card, so the policeman let the man go, but, subsequently, the Secret Service asserted that none of their agents were in that area.  When Joseph Smith let the man go, did one of the assassins just slip through his fingers?

Several witnesses (Sam Holland et al.) said that they witnessed a buff of smoke come from behind the grassy-knoll fence.  In addition, there were witnesses (Lee Bowers et al.) who claimed to have seen two individuals standing behind the fence in the same location where the smoke emerged (was one of them the man Joseph Smith let go?).  Furthermore, a large number of witnesses at the ground level and close to the JFK limousine asserted that they could smell gun powder — had there been shots only from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository, no such gun powder would have been noticed at the ground level because the sixth floor was simply too far away, too high up, and such shots would have been within the building, i.e., within an enclosure.  But the gun powder from a shot from the grassy knoll could well have been smelled by these witnesses at ground level, especially as the wind appears to have been blowing in, as per the direction of the observed puff of smoke.

Another piece of evidence which simply cannot be ignored has to do with the discrepancy between what eye witnesses saw in Dallas and at the Parkland Hospital versus the autopsy results produced at the Bethesda Hospital.  There is now a famous collage of photographic portraits of individuals who were eyewitnesses to JFK’s head wounds (see the link below).  What makes the collage so persuasive is that all of these individuals are pointing to the exact same spot in the lower-right backside of JFK’s skull to indicate where a large chuck of his skull and brain matter were blown out.  In other words, their stories were all perfectly consistent and therefore unquestionably true and accurate.

Fast forward to an autopsy photograph of the back of JFK’s skull, which was taken at the Bethesda Hospital.  The back of his skull in this autopsy photograph is intact (see the link below).  Either all of those eye witnesses from Dallas and Parkland were mistaken, yet incredibly consistent in their mistake, which seems highly improbable, or the autopsy photograph of the back of JFK’s head is a fabrication because both cannot be true.  And if there was in fact a big chunk of the back of JFK’s head blown out, it was a classic exit wound, meaning that it came from a shot from the front, not from behind.

The back of the head wound/no wound conundrum leads naturally to the Zapruder film.  I will not go into the long and complicated journey that the original Zapruder film took once it was in the possession of the government, a journey that took place immediately after it was acquired by the government and years before a copy of the original was finally shown to the public (for those interested in this convoluted journey of the Zapruder film, see the link to Douglas P. Horne’s YouTube below, which is also a comprehensive explanation of the various alterations claimed to have been made on the film).  Suffice it to say that one of the stops in this strange journey was to a special Kodak film laboratory, Hawkeyeworks, in Rochester, N.Y.  This laboratory had at the time the most advanced technology for film manipulation in the entire world.

Relative to the massive back-of-the-head wound, which so many eye witnesses attested to, the copy of the Zapruder film that was finally shown to the public in 1975, 12 years after the event, the back of JFK’s head in all the frames where it is visible is jet black and shows no wound whatsoever.  Problem is the back of the head is too jet black — there is absolutely no detail to be seen there at all.   Experts have looked at this area on the film — the back of JFK’s head — and suggested the film has been made intentional so “thin” that  no detail can be seen.  Again, I refer you to this special laboratory in Rochester where virtually any kind of film manipulation could be performed — and if film manipulation was not performed there, why on earth was the original Zapruder film sent there?

With the kill shot in frame 313, many eyewitnesses reported seeing skin tissue, brain matter, and bits of skull fragments blow off of JFK’s head onto the back of the car as well as splatter one of the motorcycle cops riding behind the limousine — the police officer later related that there was so much spray hitting him that he believed initially he himself had actually been shot.  Jackie Kennedy’s sudden movement onto the back of the trunk of the car was not to escape, but to recover one of the skull fragments.  Frame 313 is the famous kill shot that tore into JFK’s head and sprayed all this matter from JFK’s head into the air.  But here’s the thing.  That is the only frame where you can actually see this spray.  Experts have been asked whether it was possible to confine the effects of such a wound to a single frame, and they have replied that is an impossibility, which suggests that frames before and after frame 313 have been removed, and the film spliced back together.  This would have been child’s play for the Kodak laboratory in Rochester.

Evidence to substantiate this precise alteration of the Zapruder film with regard to the massive spray of matter that came off of JFK head comes from an interview held with Vino A. Brugioni on April 28, 2011.  Brugioni was a key witness relative to the Zapruder film as he not only saw the original Zapruder film in 1963 many times, but made large photographic prints (“briefing boards”) of individual frames at the federal NPIC laboratory in Washington, D.C.  In other words, this individual had a unique and intimate understanding of the original Zapruder film before any kind of alteration could have been made to it.  He was shown a blowup of frame 313 as well as the copy of the  Zapruder film in public circulation, and his attention was drawn specifically to the sequence of frames through the kill shot at frame 313, and asked him if this public copy of the Zapruder film depicted the spray coming off of JFK’s head accurately based on his knowledge of the original file.  His response:

“He insisted that the head explosion he viewed multiple times on Nov. 23, 1963, was of such a great size and duration (in terms of time) that there should be many more frames depicting that explosion than “just the one frame” (frame 313), as shown in the Zapruder film today.  Furthermore, he said the “head explosion” depicted in the Zapruder film today is too small in size and too low in the frame to be the same graphic depiction he recalls witnessing in the Zapruder film. Brugioni also stated that the head explosion he viewed was a large “white cloud” that surrounded President Kennedy’s head and was not pink or red, as shown in the extant Zapruder film. ” (see the link below entitled “Zapruder’s JFK Assassination Footage Altered by Nefarious Forces”).

The statements by Brugioni pretty much confirm the theory that frames have been removed, and the depiction of the kill shot which the public has been shown over the years is an intentionally misleading one with significantly altered film, i.e., we have never seen the “real deal”.  Why is that?

So, to summarize, there was an assassin behind the grassy-knoll fence, and he did get off the kill shot that blew out the back, lower-right part of JFK’s skull — from a shot from the front.  All of which means there was a conspiracy here, involving multiple parties, and this becomes more and more self evident the deeper you go down the JFK rabbit hole.  But it gets worse.  The worse part has to do with our would-be lunatic villain, Lee Harvey Oswald.  The first red flag you run across if you study our supposed loonie’s life has to do with a little-recorded event that took place in Japan when he was in the Army and stationed there at a top-secret base.  It is documented that he took a test to determine his proficiency in the Russian language.  Wow!

Russian is an extremely difficult language to learn, with its own alphabet, but here we have a lowly soldier who is a high-school dropout taking a Russian proficiency test.  Just wow.  Believe me, he didn’t learn whatever Russian he knew on his own — that’s for sure.  And did I mention this was a top-secret type of base connected to our U2 program, the high altitude spy plane, that U2 — in other words, a base crawling with intelligence community personnel.  Those two facts — that Oswald had learned Russian and that our intelligence community was central to the purpose of this particular top-secret base where Oswald was stationed — are not unrelated.  The conclusion is obvious: Oswald was picked out by them and taught Russian.  There can be no other reasonable explanation of this miraculous language proficiency in an extremely difficult language by a high-school dropout.  And so one must assume he was “connected” to the intelligence community at least from this point on.  That’s called common sense.

What happened to Oswald subsequently also screams his connection to the intelligence community, that is, the CIA.  When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, it was at the height of the Cold War, at a time when Americans didn’t just waltz through the Iron Curtain and enter Russia; and yet this is precisely what he did without so much as any protest on either side.

But what was even more surprising was his return from the Soviet Union.  This defector who had renounced his US citizenship and become a citizen of an apparent enemy of the United States — a communist country —  was allowed back into the United States no questions asked.  Upon his return to the United States in New York City, he was met by a known CIA “handler” by the name of George de Mohrenschildt.  This individual assisted the Oswalds in settling into the Dallas area, and remained a close tie to Oswald during the Dallas years.  It is pretty clear that from the time Oswald arrived back in the United States onward, George de Mohrenschildt was one of his CIA handlers.  (As interest in the JFK assassination revived in the mid-1970’s, George de Mohrenschildt was about to be called before Congress to give testimony of his knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald.  He never made it, and was found dead, on March 29, 1977, in a house where he was staying in Manalapan, Florida.  He had just received a note from an investigator of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that they wanted to talk to him.  The coroner’s verdict was suicide, but there have been whole books written about the untimely death of scores of individuals associated in some way, shape or form with the JFK assassination — George de Mohrenschildt was one of them.)

So after living in the Dallas area for a while, Oswald suddenly leaves — for no apparent reason — and shows up in New Orleans, being interviewed on radio as a Marxist and handing out pro-Castro  leaflets in the street.  But then you will discover, in your reading into the JFK assassination, that our “Marxist” had many contacts with a man by the name of Guy Banister — the last person on earth a real Marxist would want to have anything to do with — who was the regional CIA chief for the New Orleans area.  In other words, Oswald was clearly given a counter-intelligence assignment to go to New Orleans and infiltrate any pro-Castro groups in the area.  Once that operation was deemed to have gotten whatever information it could, Oswald returned to Dallas.

Fast forward to the day of the assassination.  A short time before the assassination takes place, which occurred precisely at 12:30, Oswald said that he was having lunch on the 1st floor of the Texas School Book Depository in the Domino Room, as related by two FBI agents who interviewed him as well as Dallas police officers who also interviewed him when he was in custody.  Captain William Fritz of the Dallas Police Department reported: “I asked him what part of the building he was in at the time the president was shot, and he said that he was having his lunch about that time on the first floor. Mr. Truly had told me that one of the police officers had stopped this man immediately after the shooting somewhere near the back stairway, so I asked Oswald where he was when the police officer stopped him. He said he was on the second floor drinking a Coca Cola when the officer came in.”  Oswald bought the Coke from a vending machine in the lunch room on the 2nd floor after he got change to buy it from the lunch-room cashier.

That police officer who stopped Oswald was Marrion L. Baker.   Just after the assassination took place, the police officer, having heard shots from above, immediately entered the Texas School Book Depository and accompanied by the manager of the building ran into Oswald on the 2nd floor.  It has been estimated that encounter with Oswald by the police officer took place merely 90 seconds after the kill shot on JFK, so some critics have speculated that it would have been physically impossible for Oswald to get to that location on the 2nd floor where this encounter took place from the so-called “sniper’s nest” on the 6th floor in so short a time.

The manager attested to the fact that Oswald was an employee so the police officer let him go, and so Baker proceeded up the staircase to the next floor.  The cashier in the cafeteria testified that she did make change for Oswald so that he could purchase a bottle of soda from a soda machine on the 2nd floor.  Apparently, assassinating someone makes you thirsty.  I don’t know about you, but if I were either planning to shoot a president of the United States or had just shot a president, I don’t think my immediate priority would be to drink a soda, particularly if I had to waste time getting change from a cashier to buy it.  (See the link below titled “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald’s Alibi” for detailed information on the whereabouts of Oswald while inside the Texas School Book Depository in that critical time frame from noon until Oswald left the building at 12:33, 3 minutes after the final shot.)

Yet another telling fact about Oswald inside the Texas School Book Depository just moments after the assassination took place is that there was a young woman, Victoria Adams, on the 4th floor who testified that she came down the staircase immediately after the kill shot on JFK — the same staircase that Oswald would have had to use to return from the 6th floor to the 2nd floor for that encounter with officer Baker.  But she said that she never did see him on the staircase — because he wasn’t there.

Finally, relative to the real assassins in the Texas School Book Depository, there is also the curious but disputed testimony of Virgil “Ed” Hoffman who made the claim that he witnessed two men, one with a rifle, leave the building just after the assassination.  Hoffman himself recanted this testimony after he went to the spot where he thought he had been standing and realized he could not have seen what he said he saw because of a high fence blocking his view, yet there is also the suggestion about this recantation that his father in fact persuaded Virgil to recant because of fear for his son’s life.   Did Hoffman see the actual assassins flee from the Texas Schoolbook Depository or was this some kind of strange delusion?  We will never know, but it is curious.

It could well be that our would-be lunatic assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been on the lower floors all along between noon and when he left the building at 12:33, and that in fact, relative to the JFK assassination, his role was to be used by our intelligence community as a throw-away fall guy.   Oswald’s own word for the role he played was “patsy”.

But here is where I do some serious speculating on my own, based on what I think just makes the most sense.  We are departing from the hard evidence here as described above, and moving into the realm of pure theory to explain Oswald’s rather odd behavior after he left the building.  For me, Oswald was more than just a patsy.  He was connected, he himself had experience as an operator.  He knew how various intelligence games were played.  He had a sense for when something was set in motion.  Prior to that fateful day November 22nd, he might well have overheard “chatter” that there was something going down in the Dallas area, but he did not exactly know what that something was — until the assassination took place, and then he knew.

So he must have left the Texas School Book Depository sensing something ominous was at play, possibly involving himself — because he had not been in the loop — why not, he might have asked himself?  His intuition warned him that he was somehow connected to what was unfolding, and this intuition was flashing danger signals, so he made tracks.  That would be my conjecture here, and I admit it is pure conjecture — I have no proof of this at all, no evidence.  But it explains his subsequent odd behavior — going back to his digs to get a revolver and, what else, going to the movies, of all things.

But before we get into Oswald’s subsequent odd behavior, a note about the murder of police officer J.D. Tippit, for it was for that murder, not the assassination of the president, that Oswald was first arraigned.  To begin with, there is a credible eyewitness, Acquilla Clemons, of that murder of the police officer who said that the officer was attacked by two men, not one.  She described the two men as short and heavy as well as tall and thin — neither description matched Oswald’s physic of short and slim.  And there were two different shell casings found at the murder scene, which tends to corroborate Clemons’s story.

It could well be that this planned execution of Tippit by these two assassins was a revenge killing totally unrelated to the other events of that day or it could be that, as many conspiracy theorists have maintained, that it was part of the conspiracy to link Oswald to JFK’s assassination and put the police on his trail.  Frankly, I have no idea which is more plausible, but it does raise the issue, what exactly did put the Dallas Police Department on the trail of a suspect matching Oswald’s description broadcast to the squad cars at 12:45, merely 15 minutes after JFK’s assassination and 30 minutes before Tippit was actually murdered.

Chapter 5 titled “Why Oswald Was Wanted,” in Mark Lane’s book Rush To Judgment is worth the price of the entire book just by itself.  It seems this physical description matching Oswald that was broadcast just minutes after JFK was assassinated had no known origin.  It just seem to have materialized out of thin air in the Dallas Police Department, which is itself highly suspicious.  Of course, if one assumes that if Oswald had nothing to do with JFK’s assassination, but the plan was to pin it on him, then of course something like this “invention” would have had to have taken place to set the wheels in motion — and  that is exactly what happened.  To this day, no one knows where this description of the suspect in Kennedy’s assassination that was broadcast at 12:45 to squad cars came from.  Remarkable.

But back to Oswald and his odd behavior after leaving the Texas School Book Depository.  That he went to fetch a revolver suggests that he felt he was being hunted by those who had killed JFK — hunted so that he would be killed and take the blame but with his mouth permanently sealed.  The final twist in the Oswald story has to do with Oswald ducking into a dark movie house — he went to the movies!  But that’s exactly the type of place a CIA operator would go to rendezvous with his handler.  It is also the type of place one would go to if one feared being assassinated by the police or a professional assassin since it is a very public place with lots of people as witnesses.

My pure conjecture concerning the behavior of Oswald after the assassination is that he put two and two together, and realized that he was in danger, that the job at the Texas School Book Depository was a setup, and he was being played as the fall guy for the assassination.  So he went to his digs to get a gun for his self defense, but then he hid in the movie house, but wanted to see his handler — to confirm or deny his suspicions.  Pathetically, even when in jail, he made one attempted phone call to an individual, John Hurt, connected to the military intelligence community — i.e., Oswald was still trying to get some kind of confirmation from the very ones who had betrayed him.

So what do we really have with the JFK assassination?  It was unquestionably a conspiracy with multiple shooters, but Oswald was in all probability not one of them (the jury really is still out on Oswald: he could conceivably have been one of the assassins, although that’s a pretty big stretch with all the improbabilities described above, or more than likely he could have been what he said he was — “a patsy”).  But there is no question that he was connected to the CIA.  And the conspiracy had too many links to the intelligence community for them not to have been the key force behind it.  Everything points to rogue elements in the CIA.

So given this very dark picture of what really happened on Nov. 22, 1963, in regard to America’s willing to confront the truth, I’m reminded of a line in a movie with Jack Nicholson who, when under oath. sneers back at the prosecuting attorney: “You can’t handle the truth!”  That has been the real problem with uncovering the truth about the JFK assassination — the country as a whole can’t handle the truth, and it doesn’t really want the truth, so the truth stays buried.

Witnesses Describe Wound in Back of Head

Autopsy Photograph of the Back of JFK’s Head Intact

Altered History: Zapruder Film Mystery by Douglas P. Horne

Zapruder’s JFK Assassination Footage Altered by Nefarious Forces

Oswald’s Miraculous Facility with the Russian Language

The Girl on the Stairs

What Was Lee Harvey Oswald’s Alibi?

Acquilla Clemons

“You can’t handle the truth!”