What Jane Roman Said

Posted by BooMan | Oct 24, 2007 | 25 |

If you were interested in Real History Lisa’s recent diary on the CIA suppressing history, you should read Jeff Morley’s immensely important (and long) 2003 article What Jane Roman Said. Trust me, stick through it until the end for the information about George Joannides. As a little primer, George Joannides is the most promising person for breaking open the JFK assassination investigation. In 1963, he was in charge of the anti-Castro Cuban organization Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) in Florida and in New Orleans. Oswald tried to penetrate the group and then was later arrested when the Cubans saw him passing out pro-Castro literature and started a fight. He never told investigators that he knew about Oswald before the assassination. In fact, he did something incredibly suspicious. In 1976, Congress created the House Select Committee on Assassinations [HSCA] . They re-opened the JFK case and were empowered to access all CIA documents related to the case. Joannides came out of retirement to act as the liaison between the congressional investigators and the CIA for document collection. He never once mentioned that he was in charge of the Cubans in 1963 that had had dealings with Oswald.

When Joannides’ real occupation came to light in the late 1990’s, it sent the head of the HSCA on a tirade:

I was not told of Joannides background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE…

We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.

Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.

I am now in that camp.

If you haven’t read What Jane Roman Said then you don’t know what you need to know about what happened back in 1963. And you need to know, because history has a tendency to repeat itself. Read more about Jeff Morley’s FOIA request for information about George Joannides’ career at the CIA.

About The Author

BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

25 Comments

Ed J on October 24, 2007 at 9:08 pm

Got as far as the part about a senile old woman being interviewed by an adviser to Oliver Stone and figured it couldn’t be worth my time.

You folks have to refute the facts of the assassination. Give us a plausible shooter, a plausible location for that shooter, tell me why Oswald went to the movies, the fuckin’ MOVIES, after one of the most important crimes in the history of the world was committed at his workplace. You can’t. So you’ll continue to massage each other with your tales of somebody said something to somebody’s brother-in-law that the Warren Commission chose to leave out of it’s report so there must be a conspiracy.
- BooMan on October 24, 2007 at 9:13 pm
  
  you don’t seem willing to learn anything. The article is fascinating on many levels…especially about the culture of the Washington Post and the villagers that occupy the district.
  - Ed J on October 24, 2007 at 9:26 pm
    
    long as I can remember. I’d love to learn where your shooter or shooters were.
    
    Teach me.
    - on October 24, 2007 at 10:21 pm
      
      You’re going in the wrong direction, Ed J. And you apparently didn’t read what I just posted very closely. While there is plenty of evidence that JFK was caught in a crossfire, you’ve obviously been fed much propaganda about the killing scene for years. In fact, even if Oswald were the lone gunman, and he wasn’t a gunman at all, it’s irrelevant to all the manuevering around him in the days leading up to the murder.
      
      There is a reason why the CIA doesn’t release things about a murder over forty years ago. Think hard, Ed.
      
      Let me give you a reading list:
      
      DEEP POLITICS, by Professor Peter Dale Scott. This book has very little to do with counting cartridge shells on the Grassy Knoll, but compares the Warren Report with the findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and shows by inference how politics and power really works in the US.
      
      THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, by Dick Russell. A long investigation about Richard Case Nagell, a man who knew too much about the assassination.
      
      SOMEONE WOULD HAVE TALKED, by Larry Hancock. As a answer to the time-worn question, Hancock explores who claimed to know something about the assassination, what they claimed to know, in what milieu they operated, etc. You will find out why the CIA doesn’t want to know about the DRE here, as well as in Russell’s book.
      
      THE ASSASSINATIONS, edited by Lisa Pease. It’s a great collection of essays about the cluster of political assassinations in the sixties. You’ll find an essay about the two (and at times three) Oswalds there.
      
      Read those books carefully, try to think logically and then report back to me. We’ll see what you’ve picked up.
      - BooMan on October 24, 2007 at 11:29 pm
        
        The question of Oswald’s guilt is of only secondary importance. More important is figuring out what his real relationship was with the CIA, who was impersonating him, and things of that nature.
        
        Here’s an excerpt from deep politics:
        
        4. The Management of the False Oswald Intercepts — October 1:
        
        It has been customary to contrast the fluid, changing stories about Oswald from human sources with the allegedly “hard,” objective reports of Oswald himself talking, or being discussed, in intercepts obtained from a tap on Mexican phone lines into the Soviet Embassy.[87] However this intercept record is deeply flawed, and in part almost certainly falsified. In addition to containing false information, the intercepts share two other features with the managed stories discussed above. They supplied the changing need for first Phase-One and then Phase-Two stories. And they too reached the CIA via the Mexican DFS, the most likely candidate to have falsified them. (Although it is customary to talk of “CIA intercepts,” the initial tapping and taping were handled by the DFS.)
        
        It is helpful to consider the intercepts in the chronological order in which they reached CIA Headquarters. We see then that the intercepts can be divided into two categories: two early Phase-One intercepts, hinting that Oswald was part of an international Communist conspiracy, and a host of later Phase-Two intercepts, clarifying that Oswald’s sole purpose for visiting the Soviet and Cuban Consulates was in connection with obtaining a Cuban visa.
        
        We have already referred to the suggestive Phase-One character of the first intercept, the only one forwarded to Washington before the assassination. This linked the name of Lee Oswald to a Soviet Consul, Kostikov, whom the CIA later identified (at least for a time) as a KGB Agent from Department Thirteen, specializing in assassinations. The cable deserves to be quoted verbatim:
        
        Acc[ording] LIENVOY [the CIA’s phone intercept program] 1 Oct 63, American male who spoke broken Russian said his name Lee Oswald (phonetic), stated he at Sovemb on 28 Sept when spoke with Consul whom he believed be Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov. Subj asked Sov guard Ivan Obyedkov who answered if there anything new re telegram to Washington. Obyedkov upon checking said nothing received yet, but request had been sent.[88]
        
        Almost certainly this speaker was not the Lee Harvey Oswald who visited the Soviet Union, and spoke relatively fluent Russian. No less an authority than J. Edgar Hoover advised Lyndon Johnson of this by telephone on the morning of November 23: “We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance.”[89] Audio tapes for these LBJ phone calls have been preserved at the LBJ Library. However nothing of this conversation can be heard on the relevant tape; it would appear to have been erased.[90]
        
        Hoover’s reasons for saying this were laid out in a Letterhead Memorandum sent out on the same day to the President and to the Secret Service:
        
        The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These Special Agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”[91]
        
        Other FBI cables and memoranda confirm that the tape was indeed flown up on a US Navy plane from Mexico City to Dallas, where FBI agents confirmed the voice was not Oswald’s.
        
        John Newman has shown in detail how this initial candor was obfuscated by subsequent clumsy attempts by the Mexico City CIA to assert, falsely, that the tape, and others like it, had been erased.[92] By noon EST November 23, the Mexico City CIA Station had cabled headquarters to say that “Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt second call” (on October 1).[93] This false claim was soon abandoned. A headquarters memo reports that by 7 AM EST November 24, headquarters knew that the first tape had been reviewed, and the voice found to be identical with that in the other intercepts.[94] Ann Goodpasture, who handled the intercepts in the Mexico City CIA station, has confirmed that she herself commented on an internal document that the voices on the first and other intercepts had been compared (by “Feinglass,” [Tarasoff] the responsible translator) before the assassination.[95]
        
        Later on the same critical day of November 23, the CIA reverted to a second false cover story: that all the Oswald intercept tapes had been erased by that time, not just the first. The FBI notified its Dallas office that evening that “With regard to the tapes [deletion] referred to herein, CIA has advised that these tapes have been erased and are not available for review.”[96] This crucial lie (concealing the existence of evidence which could have led to a conspirator in the assassination) was repeated the next day in a cable from CIA Mexico City to headquarters: “HQ has full transcripts all pertinent calls. Regret complete recheck shows tapes for this period already erased.”[97]
        
        However contemporary CIA documents suggest that comparisons of the voices on the tapes had been made, including tapes only listened to after November 22.[98] I do not accept this as conclusive evidence of the survival of the pre-assassination tapes, because (as I shall argue shortly), nothing said by the CIA about these alleged Oswald intercepts can be accepted as certain. What is certain is that in April 1964 two members of the Warren Commission staff, William Coleman and David Slawson, visited the Mexico City CIA Station and listened to the pre-assassination tape of the man identifying himself as “Lee Oswald.”[99] So the tape certainly existed on November 23, when FBI agents are supposed to have listened to it. And the rebuttal that the tapes had been destroyed is certainly false.
        
        In 1976 the staff of the Church Committee discovered the evidence that the October 1 tape had been listened to, revealing the role of an Oswald impersonator; and they reported also the ensuing cover-up. Their staff report, only recently released, noted cogently as follows:
        
        On November 25, 1963 – some two days after Dallas cabled the Bureau that the tapes had been erased – Bureau supervisor Burt Turner cabled legat stating: “If tapes covering any contact subject [Oswald] with Soviet or Cuban embassies available forward to Bureau for laboratory examination. Include tapes previous reviewed Dallas if they were returned to you.”[100]
        
        But this explosive staff report was ignored in Book V of the Church Committee’s Final Report, which purported to review the performance of the intelligence agencies in the investigation of the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy [101] In a misleadingly detailed chronology of CIA and FBI behavior on November 23 and 24, 1963, the central problem of the October 1 tape in Dallas is ignored altogether.[102]
        
        The cover-up was perpetuated, in a more sophisticated manner, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Its report stated, no less than three times, that no “recording of Oswald’s voice” was ever “received” or “listened to” in the United States.[103] This language is a lawyer’s subterfuge: what was received and listened to was precisely not a recording of Oswald’s voice.[104]
        
        In contrast to other “benign” “Phase-Two” cover-ups of a false Oswald-Soviet link, this cover-up in November 1963 can only be called sinister. The October 8 intercept cable was the strongest single piece of evidence for an illusory Oswald-Soviet assassination conspiracy. By concealing its falsity, the CIA and FBI did not just keep alive the illusion. More importantly, they obstructed the pursuit of the most important available clue at that time of a high-level assassination conspiracy.
        Digression: The October 1 Kostikov Intercept and the November 9 “Kostin” Letter
        
        This clue did not stand alone. It dovetailed with a letter, purportedly from Oswald, which was mailed from Irving, Texas on November 12 to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In this letter, the writer spoke of “my meetings [sic] with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City.” The letter also alluded suggestively to the lack of time there “to complete our business.” Even more alarmingly, the author revealed knowledge that the Consul in the Cuban Embassy had been “replaced.”[105] (The CIA confirmed later that Consul Azque “was scheduled to leave in October but did not leave until November 18.”)[106] And finally the writer spoke of speaking with Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty on November 1, a claim which would cause considerable post-assassination embarrassment to the FBI at the very highest levels.[107]
        
        The Warren Commission accepted the genuineness of this letter, largely because of corroborating evidence in the form of a rough draft, said to be in Oswald’s handwriting, which Ruth Paine allegedly discovered and then after the assassination gave to James Hosty.[108] The Soviets however considered the letter to be a fake. In a post-assassination analysis they observed that the letter was typed, whereas all of Oswald’s other correspondence had been in his own handwriting. As the Soviet Ambassador pointed out at the time, the tone was also quite dissimilar to anything Oswald had communicated before; it gave “the impression we had close ties with Oswald and were using him for some purposes of our own.”[109]
        
        I myself suspect that neither the letter nor the rough draft were genuine. There is no evidence that Oswald had plural “meetings” with Kostikov; I doubt that he had any. There is only one slight passing reference to the question of Oswald’s and Marina’s possible return to the Soviet Union, which had been the sole topic of their urgent appeals to the Washington Consulate in July.[110] It is surprising that there is no reference whatsoever to the Consulate’s rejection, just one month earlier in October, of Marina’s application to return to the Soviet Union.[111]
        
        What is particularly suspect about the November 9 Kostin letter is its timing. After being intercepted by the FBI on its way to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, the letter was summarized and communicated to Dallas, where the news arrived on November 22. Hosty thus only learned of it right after the assassination. Had he learned earlier, Oswald might have been put under surveillance; and the assassination could not have unfolded as it did.
        
        As for the rough draft, I believe that it was composed, as well as discovered, after the assassination: to corroborate, and also neutralize, the dubious Kostin letter. The “draft” pointedly converts the typed letter’s Phase-One language (“time to complete our business”) into an innocuous description of Kostikov’s role (“time to assist me”).[112]
        
        Quite independently, and for different reasons, the researcher Jerry Rose also argued that “the typed version was generated before the handwritten one,” the latter designed “to create proof that Oswald had written the letter.”[113] Among other things, Rose pointed out that six words spelt incorrectly in the “final” typed version, are in fact spelt correctly in the “draft”; while there are no misspellings in the “draft” that are corrected in the “final” version.[114] It is worth adding that virtually all the evidence that arrived separately to the authorities from the Paine household — the Walker note, the pristine Mexican bus ticket — is suspect.[115]
        
        The Kostikov intercept, and the supporting Kostin letter, were and remain two of the most incontrovertible clues of a pre-assassination conspiracy. The CIA and FBI conspired together to suppress the known fact that the voice of the intercept was not Oswald’s; and the CIA, at least, saw this as an operational matter.[116] The CIA’s behavior here was in accordance with its agreement with the Department of Justice. Its priority was to protect its sources and methods — in this case, one of its most secret and important intercept operations. By prior agreement, it put this priority ahead of the pursuit of justice — in this case, the major political crime of the century.
        
        The FBI handling of the Kostin letter was also deficient. Ruth Paine claimed that it had been typed on her typewriter; but apparently this claim was never tested, as it should and easily could have been. Whoever did have control of the originating typewriter (I personally doubt that it was Ruth Paine’s) should be considered a prima facie suspect in the murder conspiracy.[117]
  - Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 5:20 am
    
    Don’t waste your time with Ed – that’s his job. Pity the poor guy, but don’t waste time engaging him.
    - Ed J on October 25, 2007 at 6:21 am
      
      When you got nothing, run away.
      - Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 8:16 pm
        
        I’ve got a book, a 15-year-old Web site, a blog and six years of magazine articles to my name. What have you got?
      - Ed J on October 26, 2007 at 8:07 pm
- on October 24, 2007 at 9:51 pm
  
  Hey, look, no matter what anyone says to you you are not going to believe what you refuse to believe. I’d do better arguing with the Pope about atheism. That’s not a problem with anyone but you.
  
  The Oswald who was in the Texas Theater was seen going in there before another Oswald shot Tippet. The Oswald arrested in the theater had a wallet with identification on him, including an ID with the name “Hidell” on it. The Oswald who shot Tippet “dropped” his wallet next to Tippet’s body. There was a third wallet found by police in his room at a rooming house. How many wallets do you have?
  
  The wallet found next to Tippet had a driver’s license for Oswald. But according to the Warren Report Oswald couldn’t drive. A guy with the name Oswald took a car off the lot with a car salesman for a spin and drove around at high speeds.
  
  Throughout the life of “Lee Harvey Oswald” there seems to have been two or more of them in different places. For example, a Lee Oswald signed an order form for trucks for an anti-Castro group in 1960. In 1960 Oswald was in the middle of his “defection” to the USSR.
  
  In late September 1963 Oswald was in New Orleans with his wife Marina. On the same night he was also in Fort Worth talking to people connected to an anti-Castro group. He was also in Mexico City trying to get in touch with the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy. Years ago Robert Gates admitted that the guy in Mexico City six weeks before the assassination was someone impersonating Oswald.
  
  Ed J, you pretend to be a clever guy so you know that the Warren Report said that Jack Ruby had no connections to Organized Crime, right? Jack Ruby’s entire lifetime was nothing but a life of crime, from the time as a kid he worked for Al Capone’s organization until he died in prison. So you can’t be totally wed to the Warren Report. You will admit that maybe they overlooked a few things, right?
  
  Now Gates said, I believe this was back in Poppa Bush’s administration when he headed the CIA, that SOMEONE WAS IMPERSONATING OSWALD in Mexico City. Forget all the other Oswalds floating around at the time. Someone was trying to make Oswald appear to be in contact with the Communists. Six weeks before the assassination.
  
  Why would anyone impersonate a “nobody” and a “loner” in an attempt to make him appear to be consorting with the Communists six weeks before he assassinates the President? Ed J, I know if you furrow your brow really hard you may be able to come up with an answer for us. But probably not. Your hardened beliefs trump your brains.
  - Ed J on October 25, 2007 at 6:35 am
    
    of your “Oswalds”. You’re like that greeting card company, you have one for every occasion.
    - on October 25, 2007 at 10:57 am
      
      Ah, but don’t attribute the multiple Oswalds to me, Ed J. You should go back and read. I didn’t invent multiple Oswalds. THERE WERE multiple Oswalds. In fact, the first book broaching the subject came out in 1966. I was a kid at the time of the JFK assassination.
      
      With the wonder of the internet you can actually go to sites and look at various documents. I personally like the one where Oswald was buying trucks in New Orleans when he was working in an electronics factory in Minsk.
      
      The logical explanation is that there were several different people using the “Oswald” name in intelligence roles. That would explain why one Oswald would be handing out fliers for “Hands Off Cuba” in New Orleans and working out of an intelligence agent’s office while another Oswald was acting out like a wild man in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. If this was an intelligence operation and by 1963 there was an attempt to make “Oswald” appear to be a Communist agent, then having someone named Oswald contact the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy would make all the sense in the world.
      
      It would explain all those wallets, too.
      
      This would also explain why some Oswalds spoke fluent Russian and others didn’t. Or that one Oswald would sign as Harvey Lee and another as Lee Harvey. Or that Marguerite Oswald, his mother (or one of his mother’s) would get so many details of her and Lee’s life wrong when she was interviewed at one time.
      
      At some point very soon after the assassination it was decided by someone that the “Communist Avenger” theme would not be a go and needed to be replaced. Thus, the lone nut story.
      
      Glad to help, Ed J, but you should go back and read more closely.
      - Ed J on October 25, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Natasha Chart on October 24, 2007 at 11:20 pm

Why was the CIA carrying out operations directed at influencing US opinion? This seems distinctly outside of their purview.

There’s a reason Voice of America doesn’t broadcast inside the US, and that reason is that propaganda isn’t supposed to be directed against US citizens. And I say ‘against’ very pointedly. It’s difficult to make informed decisions when you’re being actively lied to. And that’s just the law about a radio station.
- on October 25, 2007 at 12:09 am
  
  The problem is that during the seventies’ hearings in Congress it was learned that many, many journalists were working with or for the CIA. People who wrote stories and op-eds that were in some way influenced or controlled by the CIA.
  
  How would people think about Watergate if they knew that, for example, editor Ben Bradlee had worked for Voice Of America in Europe to propagate the story that the Rosenbergs were guilty of treason and that they deserved to be executed? Or that during that time he worked out of the Paris CIA station? Nowadays people see Bob Woodward as a reactionary insider. How would people have felt (no pun intended) if they knew back during Watergate that greenhorn reporter Woodward had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence prior to having been discharged from the service a brief few years prior to his news scoop?
- BooMan on October 25, 2007 at 12:26 am
  
  The CIA has been intensely interested in massaging the lone-nut theory from the very beginning. Well, actually, not quite from the beginning. At first they wanted to blame it on Castro, but LBJ nixed that idea immediately.
- Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 5:23 am
  
  James Angleton said once something to the effect, if the CIA can’t spy on the people who control their future (i.e., Congress) then what’s the point?
  
  The CIA, far from a tool of the president, as they like to paint themselves, have often run their own operations independent of any real oversight. We’re experiencing some drastic blowback now. Remember that the problems in Iran are our doing. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected leader there, just when the country was blossoming. Our repressive regime installed via the Shah led to an equally repressive regime. Violence begets violance, and fundamentalism begets reverse fundamentalism.
  - nonynony on October 25, 2007 at 11:33 am
    
    Eh – Iran’s bad example. Ike knew what was going on in Iran and he sanctioned it. It was the British who came to Ike and begged him to get the US involved in preserving their empire – Persian oil fields were considered too much of an Imperial Resource to allow a scruffy democratically elected socialist Prime Minister to take control of them away from the British Petroleum Company. CIA ops in Iran were definitely not an example of a cowboy agency run wild – they were sanctioned at the highest levels to “help” our British allies preserve their hegemony in the Middle East.
    
    It IS a great example of blowback, though, and a lesson that every single member of the intelligence community should have to have tattooed on the back of their damn hands. They should have to recite every single bad assumption and bad consequence of the Iranian actions – from memory, and possibly both forwards and backwards – before they even THINK of applying “pressure” anywhere else in the world.
    - Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 8:18 pm
      
      Thanks – I did mean Iran in terms of blowback. If you want the history of a rogue operation, read the REAL history of the anti-Castro plots, which even the CIA, in its own IG report, admitted they had no executive authority to conduct.
liberaljournal on October 25, 2007 at 12:51 am

E Howard Hunt’s alleged confessions:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13893143/the_last_confessions_of_e_howard_hunt
- BooMan on October 25, 2007 at 1:09 am
  
  Right. I don’t know what to make of that story because the french/corsican hitman thing doesn’t check out.
  
  E. Howard scribbled the initials “LBJ,” standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ,” connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll.”
  
  So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that’s the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.
  
  “By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock,” Saint says. “His whole life, to me and everybody else, he’d always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn’t like Johnson. But you don’t falsely implicate your own country, for Christ’s sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that’s the last thing he would do.”
  
  Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.”
  
  David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK’s death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint’s father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.
  
  In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here’s what happens:
  
  Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a “Big Event” and asks E. Howard, “Are you with us?”
  
  E. Howard asks Sturgis what he’s talking about.
  
  Sturgis says, “Killing JFK.”
  
  E. Howard, “incredulous,” says to Sturgis, “You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?” In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis’ response is unclear, though what E. Howard says to Sturgis next isn’t: He says he won’t “get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho.”
  
  After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his “normal” life and “like the rest of the country . . . is stunned by JFK’s death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a direct role.”
  
  After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father had not only implicated LBJ, he’d also, with a few swift marks of a pen, put the lie to almost everything he’d sworn to, under oath, about his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions. But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.
  
  Shortly thereafter, Laura found out what had been going on, and with the help of E. Howard’s attorney put an end to it. St. John and his father were kept apart. When they did see each other, they were never left alone. And they never got a chance to finish what they’d started. Instead, the old man set about writing his autobiography and turned his back on his son. He wrote him a letter in which he said that Saint’s life had been nothing but “meaningless, self-serving instant gratification,” that he had never amounted to anything and never would. He asked for his JFK memos back, and Saint returned them, though not before making copies.
  
  There is no way to confirm Hunt’s allegations — all but one of the co-conspirators he named are long gone. St. John, for his part, believes his father. E. Howard was lucid when he made his confession. He was taking no serious medications, and he and his son were finally on good terms. If anything, St. John believes, his father was holding out on him, the old spy keeping a few secrets in reserve, just in case.
  
  “Actually, there were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public,” Saint says. “The question is, which one of them worked? My dad has always said, ‘Thank God one of them worked.’ I think he knows a lot more than he told me. He claimed he backed out of the plot only so he could disclaim actual involvement. In a way, I feel like he only opened another can of worms.” He takes a deep breath. “At a certain point, I’m just going to have to let it go.”
  - Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 5:24 am
    
    I’m not persuaded. Hunt was SUCH a liar, and his son may be honest, or not. I know he was touting his ‘finished’ book when I also know the guy ghostwriting it for him, who had only just begun.
  - Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 5:31 am
    
    In fact, Hunt just made another liar out of himself, because in his Watergate days, he denied knowing Sturgis back in the early sixties. Now he’s claiming he talked to him. That’s why I have to take all he says with a HUGE grain of salt. I can’t help but think he pins this on LBJ as his last chance to stick it to the Democrats, which to him were only worth being burned at the stake. He was a typically rabid right-winger.
- BooMan on October 25, 2007 at 1:15 am
  
  As for David Atlee Phillips, even his own brother thought he had a part in it.
  
  One of these is from conversations which David Phillips had with Kevin Walsh, a former HSCA staffer who went on to work as a private detective in Washington, DC In a conversation not long before his death, Phillips remarked: “My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” – David Atlee Phillips, July 1986.
  
  The second conversation was related in an email exchange between researcher Gary Buell and David Phillips’ nephew, Shawn Phillips. As Shawn described in the email, Shawn’s father, James Phillips, became aware that his brother, David, had in some way been “seriously involved” in the JFK assassination. James and David argued about this vigorously and it resulted in a silent hiatus between them that lasted for almost six years.
  
  As David was dying of lung cancer, he called his brother. Even at this point there was apparently no reconciliation between the two men. James asked David pointedly, “Were you in Dallas that day?” David answered, “Yes,” and James hung up the phone on him.
  - Real History Lisa on October 25, 2007 at 5:26 am
    
    Thanks for posting all this, Booman. It’s great to see the information spread past the insular research community!

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