No Name Key photo and other photos:

The following is in addition to the joint articles by myself and Jack White published in The Investigator, (issue no. 10, Aug.-Sept. 1994). Robert Groden, who was there when I found the No Name Key photo mentioned in my Investigator article, told me that he thinks Dick Sprague may have identified this man during the HSCA days. I need to send a copy to him and ask about it. Larry Haapanen has told me that he believes the collection of No Name Key photos were originally from Garrison's files. Since he has copies of some of those, I plan to send him a copy of this one to see if he recognizes it.

In the mean time, I am pursuing other documents based on the assumption that the photo is of Wing. My Texas Open Records Act request to UT, and Dave Armstrong's FOIA request to the CIA for records on Wing were accepted. The CIA couldn't find anything on Wing (no surprise). I have already received the UT files on Wing (more on them below). I still need to request files from the FBI, State Dept., and anyplace else I can think of.

Also, the Weaver Polaroid which was printed in Josiah Thompson's book years ago and more recently in Richard Trask's Pictures of the Pain (Yeoman Press, 1994, p. 243), will hopefully be found and studied soon. It may reveal a Rambler identical to Wing's sitting exactly where Richard Carr said it was. Regardless of an exact match, however, any degree of similarity between Wing's car and the getaway car continues to relate to Wing's enigma. More on this below.

Carol Hewett informed me that Anna Marie Kuhns Walko has found a Dillard photo showing a light-colored station wagon at the intersection of Elm and Houston. Dillard was certainly there at the right time to make this worth pursuing. The CBS film I referred to in my manuscript will hopefully turn up if the Tunheim Committee (ARRB) succeeds in getting their archives on the assassination released. Also, there are witness statements to be examined and witnesses to be interviewed. Helen Forrest and James Pennington, a largely unknown witness to the Rambler incident, are still being sought. I heard that Marvin C. Robinson has been located and wants to talk.

Wing's UT records:

I received 734 pages of personnel files on Wing through the Texas Open Records Act. These documents confirm some long-held suspicions. Listed on a 1962 biographical data form was the answer to what Wing was doing after he left Mexico City College in 1950 and before he entered UC Berkeley in 1952 (see my manuscript p.124). He received a 1951 "travel grant" from the "International Institute of Education." To my utter astonishment I found that, according to the page ripped out of UT's copy of Who's Who in CIA, "Institute of International Education" received money from the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

This same source also financed the CIA's Institute of International Labor Research. That missing page is the one showing a chart of CIA cover organizations and their private funding conduits. The National Student Association is also listed. See John Ranelagh's The Agency, the "Students and Labor" section in chapter 9, and its footnote on Jack Kaplan's nephew (p. 252, paperback ed.). Larry Haapanen suggested that I talk to Bill Turner about Kaplan, since he has done some writing on him.

E. Howard Hunt says in his memoirs (Undercover, pp. 68-69) that this secret funding was directed by the International Organizations Division within the Office of Policy Coordination under the direction of Tom Braden and his assistant Cord Meyer, who took over the division in 1954. Hunt volunteered to set up the Mexico City station for OPC -- their first fully staffed station in Latin America. He arrived December 13, 1950; three-and-a-half months after Wing married his first wife, Margarita Silvia Fuentes, on August 22, 1950 and left Mexico City College. John B. Judis says in his biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. that Buckley arrived in early September and began his CIA work for Hunt "learning about the Mexican student movement." Hunt's mission in Mexico was to "encourage anti-Communists to challenge Communists for leadership in the trade unions, professional and artistic organizations, and student organizations."-- exactly the same mission as Braden's and Meyer's IOD (Judis, pp. 90-91).

Given that missing page (the CIA chart), the other mutilated pages, Wing's Rambler and his interest in Pablo Neruda, the amazing thing here is that there are three significant connections to the Paines:

1) Hunt, who was being closely advised by James Burnham at this time, infiltrated agents into Mexico's Trotskyite organization. Burnham, who almost single-handedly killed the U.S. Trotskyite movement, had shared leadership responsibilities in that movement with Michael Paine's United Fruit/CIA-connected father, George Lyman Paine (more on this below);

2) Burton Hersh writes in his 1992 book, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, that, "Old chums from Bern had no trouble finding Dulles. By 1950 the hulking Hans Bernd Gisevius had lurched into Washington, where Tom Braden and his wife looked after him for some months as a favor to Dulles. Already something of a hardship case, Gisevius would stultify Allen with long stories about his efforts in the interests of the Lutheran Synod. Nevertheless, Dulles retained `a great fondness for him,' Braden says, and throughout this period `Allen was feeding him money, I know that Allen was signing chits for $5,000 at a time for Gisevius.'"

And 3) Michael Paine's Dulles/Bancroft-connected mother, Ruth Forbes Paine, apparently later married Arthur Middleton Young, one of the inventors of the helicopter. Ruth Forbes Paine was an active member, in Paoli, Pa., of the United World Federalists, founded by Cord Meyer. After selling his helicopter ideas to Bell Aviation in 1942, Young settled in Berkeley, founded the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, and wrote about metaphysics. He is now in his 80s and back in Pa. Bill Kelly has spoken to him and will be interviewing him soon.

Now, I wonder, from whom could a student at Mexico City College have heard about CIA/OPC/IOD money (whether he knew that's what it was or not) in late 1950? At this very same time, Tom Braden and Cord Meyer, both with close contact with the Dulles/Bancroft/Paine circle, controlled the money Wing received!! Both the nature and duration of Wing's travel fellowship now seem to be the crucial questions surrounding the two years prior to his beginning a six-year stay at UC Berkeley in August, 1952. We need to get similar documents from UC Berkeley to see what Wing told them about his travel fellowship.

Now more on that first Paine connection. Recently, Carol Hewett sent me a list of books published by right-wing publisher Arlington House. She circled some authors and subjects which I had already come to know in connection with the assassination, namely William F. Buckley, Jr., Frank Meyer, William J. Gill, Paul Bethel, James Burnham and Nathaniel Weyl.

The only two things I had known about Arlington House before seeing her list was that they published two of the books listed in the Nathaniel Weyl biography removed from The Directory of American Scholars (see my manuscript, pp. 77-79) and a book by William J. Gill that's not on her list. By the time I discovered that Weyl mutilation I had read about John Martino in Coup d'état in America and learned of his relationship with Weyl and Frank Meyer. Also from Canfield's and Weberman's Coup d'état In America, I learned of Commission Document 662 which is an FBI report on all three of them. I'll say more about CD 662 in a moment.

From the Summers missing pages, I already knew about Martino's relationship with Trafficante and Pawley. I had also been reading about Rostow in Gill's The Ordeal of Otto Otepka (Arlington House, 1969). I later learned from the biography of Buckley by John B. Judis that James Burnham (not circled but on her list) had introduced Buckley to E. Howard Hunt. Judis' book also taught me about the close relationship between Buckley and Meyer. All of these people, with the possible exception of Rostow, were spreading phase-one (communist conspiracy) stories about Oswald and Ruby after the assassination, including their apparent ties to Trotskyism.

Rostow, I learned, was on the phase-two (Oswald as lone assassin) bandwagon prior to the public release of the Warren Report. But his main concerns were not over whether Oswald had acted alone, rather they were that "Overseas the report should do something to dilute the conspiracy theory of President Kennedy's assassination;" that "The report does, however, blow the fact that Oswald saw a named KGB agent at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City;" that "the major task for ourselves [State Dept.] and the USIA will be to prevent the discussion and debate in the U.S. from projecting an image of excessive domestic disarray;" and that because "As the debate unfolds, issues will arise -- almost certainly some issues we have not now anticipated," State, Treasury, Justice, and the White House "must be a united government in this matter."

Even Paul Bethel, also on the Arlington House list, was a member of the Free Cuba Committee (headed by Eladio del Valle) and was helping disseminate a phase-one story that an "admitted Castro agent" had been arrested a week before the assassination for plotting to kill Kennedy. The fact that this motley crew is represented among the books in print at Arlington House is reason enough to suspect them of being a CIA publisher.

The most interesting individual on the list, however, is James Burnham. A suggestion from Jeff Pascal to read an essay about Burnham in The Orwell Reader led to some intriguing revelations about him. He may be a key to Wing's interest in the assassination and the Rambler. According to a former Wing student, Wing was "obsessed" with Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda. It is therefore interesting that Neruda, who is mentioned in David Atlee Phillips' Night Watch (Atheneum, 1977), wrote poetry about coups, assassinations and the United Fruit Company. Neruda was also a diplomat in the Allende government, "accompanying [Allende] in his concerns and sharing that whole turbid atmosphere with its noxious plots and intrigues orchestrated from afar." (Volodia Teitelboim, Neruda, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1991, p. 424.)

Most interesting, however, is the fact that Neruda spirited one David Siqueiros out of Mexico. Siqueiros was awaiting trial as the leader of the first abortive assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky. I learned this fascinating tidbit from a little known book on the Trotsky assassination by CIA publicist Isaac Don Levine (see Scott, Deep Politics, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1993, pp. 55, 288, 289). In the acknowledgments of that book, The Mind of an Assassin (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959; Signet, 1960), Levine writes, "To Sylvia and Nathaniel Weyl, who lived in Mexico and wrote the first biography of President Cardenas, I am indebted for translating from the Spanish the voluminous official and documentary reports on the assassin and his crime, and for their collaboration in digesting the material for publication."

E. Howard Hunt says in his memoirs, "I also met and frequently conferred with Dr. James Burnham, a Princeton classmate of Joe Bryan's and onetime professor of philosophy. Burnham was a consultant to OPC [Office of Policy Coordination, the first covert action group created within CIA in 1948] on virtually every subject of interest to our organization. He had extensive contacts in Europe and, by virtue of his Trotskyite background, was something of an authority on domestic and foreign Communist parties and front organizations. Through him I was to meet a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, Jr...."

The fact that this former communist was friends with Hunt and Buckley and ended up as a pioneer of CIA covert operations is even more intriguing considering Burnham was not your ordinary Trotskyite. In 1938, as a leader of the American Trotskyists on the National and Political Committees of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Burnham introduced a resolution declaring the USSR was no longer a workers' state but had become, as exhibited by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, totalitarian and its leaders Fascist (Albert Glotzer, Trotsky, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989, p. 284-90).

This caused such a bitter debate that Trotsky attempted to defend the movement against the "revisionists" led by Burnham. Trotsky labeled him an enemy of the dialectic and argued that Burnham "was using the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Finnish invasions merely as vehicles for developing what he regarded as untenable theoretical views." Despite Trotsky's hope that the movement remain united in case the impending world war caused the political destruction of Stalin, a formal split occurred in April 1940 -- one month before the Siqueiros led assault on Trotsky's life.

By this time, interestingly enough, despite the fact that Burnham was to address the new Minority faction's Workers' Party at their first convention, he was nowhere to be found and had in fact deserted leftist politics. A few weeks later Siqueiros gained entry to Trotsky's fortified compound because a guard simply let him in. The guard, who had been a Trotskyite for only six months, was an American named Sheldon Harte, the 23-year-old son of a wealthy New York businessman. After spraying the compound with machine gun fire, the gunmen took Harte with them. He was later found dead and thus forever silent about his strange actions on the night of the attack. But, as Trotsky's friend and biographer Albert Glotzer points out, "What is certain is that it was most unusual for the SWP to send a guard to Mexico, especially someone who was in the organization for so short a time." After Harte's death, his father said he was surprised Sheldon was a Trotskyist because he knew he had a picture of Stalin in his room and assumed Sheldon supported the Kremlin.

With the split of the American Party (the largest organized Trotskyist group), and the successful assassination of Trotsky in August 1940, Trotskyism essentially died out, but not before one last small triumph. The Workers' Party and its successor, the Independent Socialist League, were placed on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations alongside the Communist Party and similar organizations. The Trotskyist groups successfully sued the government and were removed from the list. Despite long efforts to obtain witnesses against the Trotskyists, the government was only able to find two -- a Russian expert from Columbia University, and their former leader James Burnham.

After leaving Trotskyism Burnham wrote two books on his political views, The Managerial Revolution (1940) and The Machiavellians (1942). In 1946, two years before publishing his prophetic masterpiece, 1984 George Orwell was giving a lot of thought to, and wrote his essay about these two books called "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (The Orwell Reader, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1956, pp. 335-54). According to Orwell, Burnham's view was that,

"Capitalism is disappearing, but socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of "managers." These people will eliminate the old capitalistic class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new "managerial" societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom."

In The Machiavellians, Orwell tells us, Burnham adds that, "Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Burnham does not deny that `good' motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another....Power can sometimes be won without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority." I have never read a more true and concise description of the U.S. military-industrial complex and its rise to world domination over the last 45 years.

I suspect that Burnham was a plant in the Trotskyite movement with a mission to do as much damage to it as possible in order to prevent Trotsky from taking the USSR back from Stalin and spreading Communism beyond its borders with greater skill and commitment than Stalin. I also suspect that Burnham's fellow plants in the movement, if not Burnham himself, were the actual murderers of Trotsky. How else could Burnham have the experience to advise the Office of Policy Coordination on every aspect of its operations, which included assassinations begun by the OSS in Algiers as early as 1942.

Burnham wasn't the only future Arlington House associate making 180 degree turns in his politics in the late 1930s. According to CD 662, mentioned above, the FBI investigated Sylvia Weyl in 1953 and determined that she had been a member of the Communist Party (CP) of the United States from 1931 to 1937. The report adds,

"She stated she became disillusioned because of the increasing awareness of Russian control and broke definitely with the Party in 1939.

"Frank Meyer, Woodstock, New York, a self-admitted former member of the CP, was interviewed as a reference in 1953, and stated that the Weyls broke with the CP sometime between 1937-1939. He indicated the Weyls have made public statements concerning their past activities and present feelings and he feels they are both strongly, clearly and deeply anti-Communist."

Meyer's own political transformation was seemingly so drastic that he joined the staff of Buckley's National Review in 1956 and later became a senior editor along with former Trotskyist James Burnham.

And finally, with his probable background in deep cover operations and assassinations, ties to E. Howard Hunt, William F. Buckley, Jr., and other Kennedy assassination figures published by Arlington House, it is most interesting that Burnham shared leadership responsibilities in the American Trotskyist movement with none other than George Lyman Paine, Michael Paine's CIA/United Fruit-connected father.

When we add to all of this the existence of two images in George Wing's office door montage that appear to be a photograph of Trotsky next to a photograph of his assassin, Ramon Mercader (a drinking buddy of Sheldon Harte), the implication that Wing is hinting at a connection between his Rambler and the Paine family becomes more compelling than ever.

Another discovery in the UT files on Wing has to do with his activities in 1963. Despite documented plans to the contrary, Wing missed two fall semesters during his career. His 1991 absence is accounted for by his grave illness prior to his death. The other -- long predicted through supposition -- is the fall semester of 1963 -- no explanation. In 29 years of scheduled teaching, he apparently missed only these two semesters. He even taught a reduced load in 1971 after a severe heart attack in December, 1970. Yet with increasing workloads all around, Wing, a lowly assistant professor, was apparently allowed to skip what was only the second fall semester of his new employment at UT.

Also, a new name has come up. A June 5, 1967 letter from then Spanish & Portuguese Chairman Theodore Andersson (the man who hired Wing in 1962) suggests Mafia links to a man known to Wing and Andersson as "Jack." The letter reads:

"Jack has mentioned to me a playwright and novelist named Jorge Ibarguengortia as somebody you might be interested in getting acquainted with if you don't already know him. Jack thinks he is connected with the National University, says his English is perfect and that he is not part of the Maffia [sic]. Would you be able to look him up when you go down to Mexico City?"

Wing was beginning to research literary developments in the Mexican theater around this time so this is partly innocent. But four questions immediately come to mind: 1) Who is Jack? 2) How does Jack know who is or is not part of the Mafia? 3) Who is Jorge Ibargüengortia? and 4) Why would Jorge's non-affiliation with the Mafia be of concern to Wing? Also, after re-reading Philip Agee's Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, I am wondering if the misspelling "Maffia" is a deliberate code. CIA cadets using Air Force officer school as cover were only identifiable by an "xxx" after their names on Air Force documents.

If "Jack" is Jack Dulles, the adjunct UT professor and expert on Brazil, this gets quite interesting considering Greg Doyle's latest findings on "Honest Joe" (The Fourth Decade, vol. 1, no. 5, July 1994, pp. 13-16). I accept, based on John Franklyn Elrod and other evidence, that Ruby and Oswald were involved in gun running together. Given that, it is not a stretch to accept a Paine-Ruby link through Oswald. There are also the likely Paine-Ruby links through her friend Mamantov and Ruby's buddy Periera -- both of Magnolia Laboratories. Now we learn from Doyle that Julius Schepps, associate and financier of Ruby's closest friends, was friendly with Benjamin H. Stephens, one of the organizers of Magnolia Oil, a director of Standard Oil, and an advisor to Harold Ickes, FDR's interior secretary. There are several Ruby-Dulles connections suggested by this.

Ickes, according to Emanuel Josephson's 1948 book, The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was an attorney for the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests in the Chicago area (p. 231). Josephson also connects Ickes to the "Union Now" conspiracy to return the U.S. to the British Empire as a secret colony (p. 225). That conspiracy is a major part of the writings of Carroll Quigley and Anthony Sutton, from whom we learned of similar conspiratorial intrigues involving the Wall Street law firm of Weinburg and Posner (relation to Gerald suspected but not yet known). This firm was tied to the whole Skull & Bones crowd in the 1910-20 era.

Those activities (creating the German/Russian conflict), and that crowd, included friends and members of the Dulles and Bush families. In Sutton's America's Secret Establishment, we find, on page 146, that this Posner firm was also tied to Colonel Edward Mandell House, the man who put Wilson and his cabinet from the University of Texas in the White House with Allen Dulles' treasonous uncle, Robert Lansing. Also, Lansing was stirring up trouble in Mexico at the same time as William F. Buckley, Sr. With that in mind, look at page 615 of Dick Russell's book, The Man Who Knew Too Much (paperback ed.). Mamantov and Bush knew each other "very well." All of this makes me really want to read The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1959). I'm becoming more and more interested in "interior departments" and "commerce departments." Mexico's DFS (see below) was part of that country's Interior Ministry. A look at interior and commerce officials in this and other countries reveals a motley cast of characters.

A further motivation to study Ickes is the fact that Schepps and Stephens were prominent personalities at Mercantile National Bank, in whose building was the H.L. Hunt family offices where Ruby dropped off a young woman named Connie Trammel for a job interview the day before the assassination. According to Peter Noyes, Connie told the FBI that she was a graduate of UT in 1963, the year Wing skipped a fall semester. She also told them she met Ruby while still a student when she and some girlfriends visited Dallas and stayed at Harry Ransom's old haunt, the Adolphus Hotel. Bill Kelly and I are trying to locate her.

This becomes more significant when we include a fact from the chronology section of Gaeton Fonzi's book: Michael Paine was a resident at Everett Glover's house at the time of the "Strange Magnolia" party. Of the four house mates (Schmidt, Pierce, Glover and Paine), only Paine did not work at Magnolia Labs. But Paine must have known his wife's friend Mamantov who was teaching Russian to Schmidt, Pierce and Fredricksen at Magnolia. Here are some other related items from Fonzi's book: Four days prior to Oswald beginning his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (a job arranged by de Mohrenschildt according to Marguerite), de Mohrenschildt attended a party at the Oswalds' apartment after having just left the Van Cliburn Piano Competition! Recall Van Cliburn's long time friends and supporters Barbara J. Burris and D.H. Byrd. Fonzi also reveals that John Martino was a relative of Philadelphia Mafia boss Angelo Bruno! This may be where Wing's suspected interest in both Martino and the Mafia originated.

Byrd's powerful cousin, Sen. Harry Byrd, had dealings, naturally, with Ickes. And in early 1941, Byrd wrestled control of the Lend-Lease program from Roosevelt. Eugene Rostow's first Washington post was in the Lend-Lease program. (Richard Bissell's, by the way, was in the Commerce Dept.)

According to Josephson (p. 226), Lend-Lease was a slick way around the law. The Johnson Act forbade loans to countries who had defaulted on their WWI debts. It also pulled the U.S. further into the War despite the strong isolationist sentiment in the country and in Congress. Then, according to Josephson, the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests ordered their creature, Hitler, to attack Russia rather than England, pulling the U.S. farther into the conflict. The move that finally worked, however, was Rockefeller-Standard Oil's arming of Japan and Roosevelt's goading them to attack. (An example of this, not mentioned by Josephson, was revealed in an A&E documentary on Yamamoto. In 1938, he was an invited foreign guest at U.S. Naval maneuvers showing off the effectiveness of aircraft carriers. The maneuver chosen by the Navy to do this was a mock bombing of Pearl Harbor!)

Now here's something even more intriguing: In Deep Politics, Scott tells about Mexico's DFS Chief, Miguel Nazar Haro (a close friend of Winston Scott) who "was secretly indicted by a U.S. grand jury in San Diego for his participation in North America's largest stolen-car ring, the CIA blocked the indictment because of Nazar Haro's `indispensability as a source of intelligence in Mexico and Central America.'" (Scott, p. 105) The footnote for that statement tells us, "Others who have been linked to trafficking in stolen cars across the U.S.-Mexican border include Frank Sturgis and Richmond Harper (see Chapter 5), as well as the major Nicaraguan drug trafficker Norwin Meneses Canterero."

Moving on to chapter 5 we learn that Richmond Harper is the brother of Tito Harper at whose ranch George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt stayed as the first stop of their walking trip from Mexico to the Panama Canal. Richmond was also involved with Herman Beebe, drugs and arms smuggling, Barry Seal, the Gambino crime family (Ruby was involved with the Genovese family in Cuban gun running according to Ruby employee Nancy Perrin Rich whose husband, Robert, owned a Rambler), and deeply tied to the Nixon White House. De Mohrenschildt reported back to the CIA after that walking trip.

Based on this, de Mohrenschildt is very likely another Oswald-Ruby-Paine connection -- with the addition of stolen cars. This strengthens the likelihood that the third Oswald-Ruby-Paine-Rambler connection I noted in my manuscript, involving de Mohrenschildt's Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Trust and its ties to 30th of November gun running and the assassination, also involved a Rambler wagon like Wings. Why? Because of C.B. Smith's ties to de Mohrenschildt's former employer Buckley Sr. (Pantipec Oil) and General Motors (whose Cuban representative was on de Mohrenschildt's Oil Trust board; see p. 134 of my manuscript.) I strongly suspect that somewhere there is a Smith connection to Nazar Haro's stolen-car ring also. And let's not forget Jack Lawrence's background in auto dealerships in Florida.

Even the Warren Commission, in its February 24, 1964 memo to Richard Helms noted, based on a Chicago informant connecting 30th of November arms sales to the Kennedy assassination, that Ruby could have been motivated by involvement with such a group.

And I'll bet that when I take a look I find a C.B. Smith link to Jack Valenti's Al Thomas Appreciation Dinner committee in Houston; on which sat Jack Halfen (another gun runner involved with Ruby). Of course it was that dinner (the November 21, 1963 date of which was set just prior to April 23, 1963 and never changed) that brought Kennedy to Texas. Recall that the UT Rambler switched ownership from Smith to Wing on April 26, 1963 -- two days after LBJ announced the Texas trip to the press in Dallas, Marina moved in with Ruth, and Oswald left for New Orleans.

"Wing" and the Secret Service:

In WC Vol. 26 there is a Secret Service report (CE 3075) with attachments. One of the attachments is the manifest for Delta 821, the flight the Oswalds took from New York to Dallas on June 14, 1962. At the bottom of the alphabetized list is the name "Wing".

George Wing was in Berkeley around this time finalizing his employment plans with the spook-schooled Theodore Andersson (Yale, Wells College, American University, State Dept.), and preparing for his trip to Austin to start his new job at UT. But of course he could have been anywhere. I'd sure like to learn as much as possible about this manifest. And if that is George on that flight, I'd like to find out who "Smith" and "White" are. The Secret Service obviously wanted to know who flew with the Oswalds. Now, so do I.

Craig Coverup?:

I received from Walter Graf pages that appear to be copied from Roger Craig's 1971 manuscript. I was worried by differences between some of the statements in those pages and slightly different statements in a copy of Craig's manuscript I received in March 1993 from Michael Murphy of Fort Lauderdale. Mr. Murphy sent his copy to me via computer linkup, but I trusted it was faithful to Craig's original work. If Mr. Graf's excerpts from the manuscript are verbatim, then those in Murphy's copy are not.

Another thing that bothered me was that I based an erroneous conclusion on one of those differences (see my manuscript pp. 64-67). A notation about "Page 22 - Par. 5" in Mr. Graf's copy made me realize I had completely missed Craig's reference to the release of this prisoner. I falsely accused Craig of omitting it from his manuscript. The relevant passage from my copy reads:

"I had several meetings with Jim Garrison. He showed me numerous pictures taken in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Among them was a picture of a Latin male. I recognized him as being the same man I had seen driving the Rambler station wagon in which I had seen Oswald leave the Book Depository area. I was surprised and I asked Jim who the man was. Jim did not know but he did say this man was arrested in Dealey Plaza immediately after the assassination but was released by Dallas Police because he could not speak English! This was, to me, highly unusual. In my experience as a police officer I had never known of a person (or prisoner) being released because of a language barrier. Interpreters were, of course, always available."

Had I noticed this it would have answered all my questions about it and possibly also about the Rambler. Dennis Ford erroneously stated that Craig saw the driver in custody because of Henry Hurt's statement that "According to Craig, the Latin man was released...." It was according to Craig, but Hurt left out the fact that Craig's source was Garrison.

That's because Hurt's source (Gary Shaw's Cover-Up) also failed to credit it to Garrison. Shaw's source, an interview with Craig taped the same year he wrote his manuscript, has Craig stating that the Latin man was released. True enough, but Craig didn't see it happen. This led Prof. Ford to credit it to a nonexistent eyewitness account by Craig. Craig only learned of the release from Garrison.

Making matters worse, Ford blended this photo identification with an entirely separate photo which Craig identified for Garrison -- that of Edgar Eugene Bradley. This blending of facts led Ford to state that Craig saw the driver released by Edgar Eugene Bradley. Amazing! Dennis Ford has been the leader in warning researchers against such inaccuracies based on unreliable memories.

Ford's problem may well have come from his own vague memory of two poorly written sentences in Penn Jones' Forgive My Grief III. Those sentences, in which the same facts are blended, reads: "The driver of the station wagon, according to Craig, was a Latin who had been arrested minutes before and immediately released by a man posing as a Secret Service agent. In October 1967 when Craig was shown a picture of Edgar Eugene Bradley he identified Bradley as the man who posed as a Secret Service agent that day."

Whether or not a fake Secret Service man was involved (Garrison only said the "Dallas Police" released him), that does not mean it was the same one Craig encountered. Maybe Garrison told Craig that Bradley got the driver released. Maybe Craig said this on that tape Gary Shaw has. But if that is so, why did Craig not put it in his manuscript? In any event, the important thing here is that we can now track down that photo Garrison showed to Craig and see if the Latin man is Eladio del Valle. That is who Cuban Intelligence identified as the Rambler driver based on witness descriptions (see Claudia Furiati's recent book, ZR Rifle, Ocean Press, 1994, p. 130).

William F. Buckley, Sr.:

On August 26, 1994, Bill Kelly told me an amazing fact he found in a biography of the Buckley family: William F. Buckley, Sr. taught Spanish at the University of Texas at Austin! That makes it all but certain that C.B. Smith was a student of Buckley's. I plan to request Buckley's UT personnel file. Someone also needs to look into an incident that has been a curiosity to me for years: The April 1963 death of Walter Prescott Webb in a car accident in Austin. Webb was Smith's mentor and a close friend of LBJ (see my manuscript, p. 122). Webb was also the type of person who could put two and two together, and who would not tolerate a conspiracy to assassinate the President.

Back Seat Magazines:

Bill Kelly made a fascinating connection regarding the June 7, 1963 Life magazine (see my appendix). I looked through it in vain for anything as obviously JFK connected as in the Esquires. Bill called on May 14, 1994 and said it is obvious if you are familiar with a little-known story among the Kennedy assassination lore. In the magazine is a small story about dredging the underwater debris field of a nuclear sub that sank the previous April, the Thresher.

As I have recently learned, only a handful of researchers -- Bill Turner, Kenneth Formet and Larry Haapanen among them -- know anything about this aspect of the assassination. According to Kelly and Haapanen, no one has ever published a word about it; a fact that is most intriguing with regard to Wing's back seat magazines. It is the Bray-Thresher story. I first read about it in Bill Kelly's excellent unpublished manuscript.

In brief, Edward F. Bray sent Governor Connally a warning letter on August 12, 1963. It said that, "a plot is underway to assassinate you." Bray, who worked for the Bendix Corporation, claimed he had been visited by some men who said they were investigating the sinking of the Thresher. They said they were members of an organization known as Justice for the Crew of the Thresher (JFCOTT).

The men claimed its members were planning to assassinate John B. Connally and another former Secretary of the Navy, Fred Korth. Bray reported this to the authorities three months before the assassination. He also predicted, based on what he had learned from the men, that Connally would be shot by a disgruntled ex-serviceman with a high powered rifle while riding in an open car during a parade in Dallas.

The men later returned, according to Bray, and left him an 8mm film of the assassination, taken from the vantage point of the alleged assassin's lair on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Bray claimed that stills from the film were received by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The Bendix Corp. was the plaintiff and Bray was the defendant in a trial that took place in Natrona County, Wyoming in March, 1965. Court documents obtained by researcher Kenneth Forment indicate that Bray tried, unsuccessfully, to have the film entered into evidence.

Bray claimed he later showed the film to former Presidential assistant Theodore Sorensen, at a banquet in Portland, Oregon in 1966. when contacted by Formet, however, Sorensen's office, declined to comment on anything involving the assassination of President Kennedy.

Bill Kelly speculates that alternative motives were being set up for Oswald in case the `lone-nut' scenario did not hold up. The JFCOTT motive, according to Kelly, "was predicated upon Oswald's dissatisfaction with his `undesirable' military discharge."

Kelly also points out that during World War II, George DeMohrenschildt lived in Washington D.C. with two men, one a British MI6 agent, and the other a U.S. Naval officer named Hall, who was later a skipper of the Thresher, but not at the time of its accident.

Kelly also notes that "DeMohrenschildt also went out of his way to introduce Oswald to retired Admiral Chester `Henri' Bruton, a former nuclear sub commander who was a senior executive at Collins Radio. Burton's [sic] last job for the Navy was to redesign the Navy's communications systems with its nuclear submarine fleet."

On May 21, I talked with David Gage, whom I've known for several years through local politics. He joined the Navy in 1970, was in underwater demolitions, attended Marine sniper school, and spent most of his Navy career serving submarine duty. For many years he's been involved in high-level sonar research at the University of Texas.

When I mentioned the June 7, 1963 Life pictorial about the dredging operations, he surprised me by saying, "Yeah, the one showing the O-rings." I asked how he knew that. He said everyone in the submarine fraternity knows about the Thresher. He had never heard of JFCOTT or the Bray incident, however -- a fact also intriguing with regard to Wing.

According to Gage, the common opinion among submarine crews is that the official story is wrong. Thresher, he said, could not have been crushed due to a failure of its pressure gauges. Subs have several backup systems and the engineers even have non-technical means of sensing depth.

Gage's theory, shared by other submarine crewmen, is that Thresher was involved in an unauthorized search and destroy bluff of a Soviet sub. It is a game he admitted being involved in often. They would carry the bluff as far as opening the torpedo doors -- which can be heard by the enemy sub. When I asked if they always stopped short of firing, he said, "If they fired, no one ever admitted it."

He described a tricky maneuver that Hunter class subs use in this game to position themselves behind the enemy. It causes a period of blindness of the surrounding terrain. He suspects Thresher clipped a mountain during one of these maneuvers. A coverup could have simply been to keep the Soviets from making political hay out of it. But David said those who knew anything could have kept it from ONI investigators without all that much difficulty.

I asked him about Collins Radio equipment on board and he said he didn't know of any used for navigation, which is what he did. He added that they could have been used in communications but subs never transmitted, they only received. He encouraged me to keep digging and said if he comes across anyone with knowledge of the Thresher he would put me in touch with them. I also intend to contact a former next door neighbor, Eric Copt, who is now an executive with Chevron Oil in Denver, Colorado. He was serving on a sub in 1963 which was later in the Tonkin Gulf during the "attack" on the Maddox.

I also need to see if another fellow I know, Gerrell Moore, can shed any light on this. He's currently the comptroller of the Pflugerville Independent School District. He was the chief intelligence officer (NSA) aboard the Maddox during the Tonkin Gulf incidents. He's been telling what he knows about that period for years but none of the "authors" who have interviewed him, including one from U.S. News and World Report, have every published his more incriminating observations. He may at least know someone equally willing to talk about the Thresher. The fundamental question, though, is: What, if any, was George Wing's interest in the subject?

Smith-Wing-Rogers Nexus:

There seems to be a promising line of inquiry concerning C.B. Smith and Charles Frederick Rogers. Keep in mind that any truthful part of the assassination must necessarily connect to other truthful parts.

It began with new information related to the January 1964 Esquire back-seat magazine. At the very least, this issue refers back to Wing's office door montage (see my manuscript pp. 82-83). I'd like to hear someone argue that none of this could be considered cryptic. It would have to be someone with quite a high tolerance for coincidence.

Consider this piece of the puzzle: R.H.S. Crossman (whose article on Dresden appears in that issue of Esquire) has also written about the psychological warfare aspects of the Darlan affair. Admiral Jean Darlan was a key figure in Vichy France who led that collaborationist government's negotiations with Hitler. The U.S. made a deal with him allowing them to land in North Africa without French resistance and allowing the very anti-communist Darlan to be military governor of North Africa with assurances that he would have U.S. support as a senior leader in postwar France. Moscow was of course very upset about this and it was quickly turning into another Hess situation.

The intra-Allied conflict was conveniently put on ice when Darlan was assassinated allegedly by a rightist! The strongly suspected conspiracy behind the assassin remains a mystery to this day. Sound familiar? The man who replaced Darlan was his political twin General Henri Giraud. There was one difference, however. Giraud was principally sponsored politically and financially in Western circles by Allen Dulles. This was prior to Dulles becoming involved in the Hitler plot with Ruth Paine's friend! (See Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast, Grove Press, 1993, pp. 120-21.)

While we are in this era, let's not forget the similarities between the fatal Kennedy motorcade and the motorcade that resulted in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. There are also indications (from Mary Bancroft no less) that Dulles may have been involved in that assassination.

I found something related to this while thumbing through Thomas Powers' new book, Heisenburg's War. Werner Karl Heisenburg was Germany's Robert Oppenheimer. The OSS was very nervous about Germany's atomic bomb research. I looked up Dulles in the index and to my amazement discovered that Powers wrote about Dulles as the manager of an OSS assassination plot against Heisenburg -- using as the assassin, a former major league baseball player.

Meanwhile, back in the states, C.B. Smith's work overlapped with the War Production Board whose vice chairman was Ferdinand Eberstadt, formerly a central figure in Dillon, Read & Company's financing of Aryanized German industrialists, and later a central figure in the creation of the CIA. Eberstadt sat on this board with John J. McCloy.

After the war, C.B. Smith went to work for GM, whose pre- to post-war German plant managers benefited greatly from Nazi prisoner/slave laborers, and who, according to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, had become deeply involved in German weapons production. Smith was an executive in the company's most prestigious division, Chevrolet. He was GM's Chevrolet man in Houston, where he had already made a big name for himself as a professor and athletic director at the University of Houston.

Add to this the fact that in Houston, directly after the war, Charles Frederick Rogers, CIA/CAP pilot, cold blooded killer, and identical twin of "Frenchie," lived with his Marcello-bookie father, next door to a Chevrolet dealership while attending the University of Houston. Rogers spent the war as a carrier and destroyer radio man (read cryptographer) for ONI in the South Pacific stomping grounds of Navy Secretary James Vincent Forrestal (former president at Dillon, Read with his good friend Eberstadt). Spanish student Wing was an aviation fire controlman and ordnance specialist (and according to his UT files, worked on bomb sights) in the Navy during the exact same period that fluently Spanish speaking Rogers was enlisted. Forrestal's Navy legal aide was John B. Connally. This most definitely suggests the pre-history of a Smith-Wing-Rogers nexus.

These same South Pacific islands were the testing grounds (using allied prisoners as guinea pigs) of the germ warfare experiments whose Japanese perpetrators were given immunity by General Charles Willoughby in exchange for their test data. This data, no doubt, later found a home in Richard Helms' brainchild, MK/ULTRA. Serving directly under Willoughby, of course, was Colonel William Potter Gale, who directed the anti-Japanese guerrilla operations in the Philippines -- the same operations that later made Edward G. Lansdale's name legendary. (See the November 1993 High Times magazine.)

These same germ warfare experiments were allegedly the target of photo-reconnaissance by the ill-fated Earhart-Noonan flight. If so, Forrestal could have given it his blessing. Interestingly, Earhart often visited, as a nurses aide, the same airfield in Toronto where Forrestal had trained as a pilot. More interestingly, Richard E. Byrd, pioneer of naval photo-reconnaissance, helped finance the Earhart-Noonan flight.

I recently learned from Richard Ryckoff in Maui that, according to John Judge, Forrestal debriefed Byrd after a post war trip to the South Pole. Byrd then gave several public speeches about how WWII was not over because there were Nazi camps operating at the South Pole.

Forrestal, who returned to Dillon, Read after the war and later became the nations first secretary of defense, died in 1949 after being sacked by Truman for plotting against him in the 1948 presidential election.

He allegedly committed suicide after telling his friend Ferdinand Eberstadt that certain people in the White House were out to get him. Eberstadt sent him to visit Robert Lovett in Florida where things got worse. He was admitted to Bethesda Hospital where on May 22, he fell sixteen floors to his death when a pajama cord he was hanged by, snapped outside a storeroom window. No one of Forrestal's stature in Washington hierarchy has committed suicide since then until very recently -- Clinton's friend Vince Foster. There was, however, the 1987 attempted suicide by then private citizen, former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, one of the original planners of the Contra war against Nicaragua and a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Forrestal was not only the man who directed Eberstadt to put in writing his ideas that created the CIA, he urged and co-planned, with CIA Director Hillenkoetter, the first political covert action by the agency, and he was the one who originally had George Kennan put his ideas on containment in writing -- thus becoming arguably the father of the modern military-industrial-intelligence establishment and all it wrought. (Kennan's brother, Kent W. Kennan, is a professor emeritus at UT.) The icing on this cake is the fact that the Dillon of Dillon, Read & Company was Douglas Dillon, the man ultimately in charge of JFK's Secret Service.

It's becoming more and more unlikely that the January 1964 Esquire magazine, with its references to R.H.S. Crossman, just found its way into the back seat of Wing's unusual car with at least one other highly intriguing magazine and remained there for at least two years by a normal run-of-the-mill coincidence. Can the argument that there is nothing whatsoever cryptic about this magazine be made beyond any reasonable doubt?

When thinking about this, I consider the concepts of cryptology and advertising. Wing, it seems, was engaged in both. On the one hand he had to advertise the existence of his car and its strange holdings. On the other he had to disguise the ultimate message being advertised. Put another way, he had to draw attention to a mystery.

Perhaps he knew human nature well enough to realize that there are people who cannot ignore a mystery, whereas there are lots of people who will ignore, and in this case perhaps discredit, advertising. Also there is the possibility that if he were too obvious, depending on how long he had been engaged in this activity, his attempted communication could have been directly noticed by Gonzalez-Gerth, Ransom, Dulles, Smith, Rostow, Kennan, Kozmetzky, Gemberling, Burris, LBJ, D.H. Byrd, Dr. Oscar W. Reinmuth (reportedly Ransom's closest friend and OSS office mate who was head of the UT Classics Dept.), Charles Kunkel (the Secret Service man who interrogated Marina, was possibly listed in Ruby's notebook, and later became Austin's SAIC), or any number of other possible informants.

Sugar and Leek:

These authors of The Assassination Chain (Corwin Books, 1976), were the among the first, if not the first to point out the strangeness at the party where Oswald "met" Ruth Paine. Having not read their book, I had to figure all of that out on my own. Their book was the last place I expected to find a prior study of it. Sybil is dead but I would like to locate Burt Sugar and ask him some questions about his Paine-Ruby claim.

Links between persons A, B and C:

A common counter-argument against my manuscript is that it is merely guilt by association. But when person A is accused of killing the president of the United States from a building he was working in due to help from person B, and person C kills person A in police custody, and persons A, B and C all have past and present links to political assassination conspiracies, and there is an additional mountainous preponderance of circumstantial evidence (e.g. Ruth Paine, Arthur Young and the Catherwood Foundation), the probability of linkage extends well beyond a reasonable doubt. In the U.S. legal system a preponderance of circumstantial evidence is equal to hard evidence. Ruth Paine could have borrowed a Rambler station wagon from Jack Ruby.

Another counter-argument is: Because there is no hard evidence, none should be sought. Mine is: There is plenty of evidence to make it worth asking Burt Sugar what he knows and how he knows it. A good case in point is the Phillips/Bishop situation. There is not a shred of hard evidence that they are one person, but the circumstantial evidence is conclusive. As Fonzi says, "`Maurice Bishop' was David Atlee Phillips. I state that unequivocally....In addition to the abundance of evidence...believe me, I know that he was. And Bob Blakey and the House Assassinations Committee knew that he was, although its report did not admit that." (Fonzi p. 408) That also applies to the evidence suggesting the pre-history of a Wing-Rogers-Smith nexus.

Jane Robertson:

I give her full credit for anything that results from our Rambler research. After telling her about Wing's car briefly during ASK `92, she made me aware, two months later, of the Ruby-Cheek connection and Kensington's and Ford's articles referring to the Dealey Plaza Rambler. That, in turn, led directly to my paper. Prior to her interest I thought the Rambler was a dead issue despite my curiosity about Wing. Ironically, the reason we had our initial conversation was because she vaguely remembered reading about a Paine-Rambler-Ruby link. She was most disappointed when she rediscovered it in Sugar and Leek. She then attempted, without success, to locate Sugar.

Dave Reinmuth:

On July 25, 1993, I got a call from researcher Dave Reinmuth of Irving, Texas. He was one of Jim Marrs' students and had a friend, John Armstrong, who had helped Craig Roberts with his book, Kill Zone: A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza, (Typhoon Press, 1994).

Reinmuth had just read my Providence paper and wanted to tell me that his maternal grandmother was a member of the Byrd family and, more importantly, that his paternal grandfather was Dr. Oscar W. Reinmuth, former chairman of the UT Classics Department. Dr. Reinmuth was Harry Ransom's best friend and former office mate when Reinmuth was serving in the OSS. This was the first direct connection between Ransom and the OSS.

Dave Reinmuth said he had many of his grandfather's letters in his attic and would read them for more information on Ransom. He also said he had Ruth Paine's phone number and would call her and attempt to get her on record regarding any contact at any time with a Rambler station wagon or the owner of such a car.

Dave Perry suggested that I do that myself and gave me Ruth Paines address and phone number. But I think that's a bit naive considering Paine's connections to the CIA and Allen Dulles. I also must assume that Ruth Paine is aware of my research and its incriminating nature to her and her family. I would rather see her under oath before the Tunheim Committee.

Reinmuth also told me his grandfather and Ransom took road trips together in 1963.

Bernard Barker:

Two Dallas lawmen at the scene of the crime encountered and later identified one fake Secret Service man each. These incidents are therefore related. Craig's encounter dealt with a Rambler directly, and Weitzman's encounter later dealt with Barker directly, and the Red Ripper dealt with a Rambler and Barker directly. As for Craig's and Weitzman's sightings, the only possibilities are 1) they were both wrong, 2) one of them was wrong, and 3) they were both right (the most dangerous possibility for all concerned). Ed Tatro says, from a position of authority, only that Craig's "identification of Edgar Eugene Bradley is suspect." Apparently both Weitzman and Craig lied about the Mauser so they may have both been engaging in disinformation here too. But the circumstances of Weitzman's identification (Coup d'état, pp. 56-57) suggest he was telling the truth. (I don't know, but would like to learn, whether Patrolman Joe Marshall Smith was ever shown Barker's photo for ID purposes.)

Since Weitzman feared for his life and may have suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his identification, it raises further suspicions in Craig's death which occurred only a couple of weeks later. Ed Tatro also accepts Craig's death as a suicide, but Ed's source close to Craig's circle of friends does not. The jury is still out. Whatever the truth, the relationship of Weitzman's Secret Service man ID to Craig's and Wing's Rambler is obvious and had to be included in my study.

Paine-Oswald relationship:

Bill Kelly said he would try to get copies of the 1957 ONI Paine-Oswald documents from Gus Russo but he said Russo is pretty secretive these days since his book is about to be published.

Roger Craig's Rambler allegations:

The following is an analysis of Dave Perry's 1992-1993 unpublished articles "Men of Zeal" and "The Rambler Man". Some researchers have privately distrubuted copies of these. In both articles, which are nearly identical, Perry tried to debunk Roger Craig's eyewitness account of the Rambler incident.

In the later article, "The Rambler Man", he refined his argument so that an apparent error was less obvious. He then sent a copy to Ruth Paine, who was very complimentary of it! On the other hand, Dave has done some excellent debunking of his friend Gerald Posner.

Garrison says matter of factly on page 95 of On the Trail of the Assassins that, "Walthers drove out to the Paine residence...and confirmed that Mrs. Ruth Paine did have a Nash Rambler station wagon with a luggage rack on top, as Craig had observed." Rather than speculate about what Walthers reported to Craig, I would like to see if Walthers' investigation of the car was ever verified. How was Garrison so sure? Was Walthers interviewed? Hopefully someone can find the answer in Garrison's files. It would settle the issue of Craig's and Garrison's credibility on that point.

As for Oswald's thought process during the interrogation, I will address Sheldon Inkol's "simplest explanation" (i.e., that Oswald was lying about the car belonging to an innocent Mrs. Paine to make his getaway appear innocent) as well as Dave Perry's "miscommunication" hypothesis. Perry, at least, does not ignore the important fact that Oswald's statement was an excited utterance, which is frequently considered inherently truthful by our legal system.

Dave Perry makes an argument for a communication problem in "The Rambler Man." He claims it stems from Fritz's question to LHO, as quoted in Craig's testimony to Belin (6H 270): "What about this station wagon?" Dave writes, "Perhaps when Oswald heard the words station wagon, he immediately thought of Ruth Paine's Chevrolet station wagon. His response to Fritz could then be predicated by the fact Mrs. Paine had given him driving lessons in the Chevy a few short weeks before. Craig and Oswald would then be referring to different station wagons!" To make these suppositions Dave depended on a prior conclusion that he drew in error.

Referring to the above quotation of Fritz in Craig's testimony Perry writes, "Wait a minute! Craig never charged the Warren Commission altered this portion of his testimony. He also claimed Fritz never mentioned the station wagon. The cracks in the `story' began to appear."

The only cracks apparent here are in Dave's comprehension. In fact, Craig did charge the Warren Commission with altering this portion of his testimony. The "charge"and the "claim" that Fritz never mentioned the station wagon are one and the same. Perry's error occurred by taking Craig's single statement about this in his autobiography completely out of context, allowing him to see it falsely as a claim unrelated to altered testimony.

In his 1992 version of this paper titled "Men of Zeal," Dave makes the same error. But in this earlier paper he follows his error with a long quote from the very portion of Craig's manuscript which is about altered testimony. Yet he ends the last paragraph after the first two sentences -- exactly where Craig makes the charge Dave says he "never" made. The complete paragraph in Craig's manuscript, cut short by Dave reads:

*I said that I got a good look at the driver of the Rambler. The Warren Commission: I did not get a good look at the Rambler. (In Captain Fritz's office) I had said that Fritz had said to Oswald, "This man saw you leave" (indicating me). Oswald said, "I told you people I did." Fritz then said, "Now take it easy, son, we're just trying to find out what happened", and then (to Oswald), "What about the car?" to which Oswald replied, "That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don't try to drag her into this." Fritz said car -- station wagon was not mentioned by anyone but Oswald. (I had told Fritz over the telephone that I saw a man get into a station wagon, before I went to the Dallas Police Department and I had also described the man. This is when Fritz asked me to come there). Oswald then said, "Everybody will know who I am now;" the Warren Commission: Stated that the last statement by Oswald was made in a dramatic tone. This was not so. The Warren Commission also printed, "NOW everybody will know who I am", transposing the now. Oswald's tone and attitude was one of disappointment. If someone were attempting to conceal his identity as Deputy and he was found out, exposed--his cover blown, his reaction would be dismay and disappointment. This was Oswald's tone and attitude--disappointment at being exposed!

This asterisked paragraph is the last of five such itemized paragraphs prefaced with, "The following are some of the changes in my testimony:". Also noteworthy is the fact that the "station wagon" charge is sandwiched between two other examples of changes in his testimony. Taken in context then, Craig did indeed charged that the Warren Commission altered this portion of his testimony.

Revisionist delusions aside, the correct supposition is that Oswald understood the question about "what happened," with "the car," when "this man saw you leave." His answer was: "I told you people I did [leave]," adding that he left via "that station wagon" which "belongs to Mrs. Paine" but despite that, "don't try to drag her into this."

Furthermore, Oswald claimed he had left work that day because there would be no more work that day because the President had been shot that day. He also knew he was accused of shooting a police officer that day. Oswald's interrogation session began at about 4:20 p.m. on Friday. Craig says he arrived at Fritz's office shortly after 4:30 p.m. The primary focus of the questioning that early was most likely about Oswald's whereabouts that day after leaving work. Under those circumstances, even if he had driven the station wagon himself, it is not likely his thoughts drifted to driving lessons in the previous weeks. If anything, he wondered how he got into this fix.

Sheldon Inkol's "innocent-looking pick-up" explanation is interesting, but it's not all that simple. What he is saying is that the lie backfired. Oswald was trying to ride the coattails of an "innocent" Mrs. Paine. But in Craig's mind it linked Paine to the "guilty" Oswald. The first problem is that this does not explain Oswald's very next statement: "Everyone will know who I am now."

Along with being an excited utterance, maybe that is why that explanation did not occur to Belin during Craig's testimony. I wonder if it ever crossed the minds of the Commission's staff attorneys. They certainly gave the issue enough thought to obstruct justice by burying Robinson's statement, fabricating Oswald's escape route and altering Craig's testimony and reports. Apparently, if they had explained it that way they could have accepted the facts as Craig stated them, and decided Fritz was mistaken about Craig (or allowed Fritz to corroborate Craig). They could also explain Oswald getting to the Tippit murder scene in the allotted time. The only down side would be coming up with an innocent driver who knew nothing about what had happened. But even that seems easier that the way they handle it.

In telling this lie Oswald would be gambling that Craig didn't get a good enough look at the license plate. Also, if Oswald knew it was not a car the Paines owned, he was gambling that Craig did not notice the model. We can be sure that Oswald left in a Rambler. The lie would be exposed as soon as it was determined the Paines did not own a Rambler.

For those reasons Oswald's self-serving lie would be very flimsy to begin with. And I do not see Craig taking Oswald's word for anything. Craig apparently did withhold judgment until Walthers reported his trip to the Paine residence. Even in Craig's mind, such a lie could only backfire if it checked out. Craig was so adamant that the Paines had a Rambler, I cannot believe he did not at least hear that fact from Walthers. If Craig was lying he was also purposely making a fool of himself. He knew how easily a lie about such a thing could be exposed. It is highly unlikely he would do that voluntarily. Most importantly, the Commission's Rube Goldberg way of covering it up seems to make sense only if they knew Paine had some connection to the Rambler.

For Oswald to make an attempt to look innocent, it also follows that Oswald himself did not have any suspicions of the Paines. Oswald knew he was falsely accused and had in fact been framed. If Oswald was lying about the car belonging to Mrs. Paine the question arises: Was Oswald himself trying to drag her into it? And if so, why? In thinking about how he ended up "a patsy," did he see her role in getting him the job in that building (among other things) as a major part of the set up? More complex scenarios are figured out every day the moment anyone is confronted with a surprise party. Both his mother and brother implicated the Paines even in their Warren Commission testimony. If Oswald was prepared to show how the backyard photos had been faked, I do not think he would hesitate to point out the Paines role in setting him up.

On the other hand, if Oswald was responding honestly to the question, he was under the impression that the Rambler station wagon, in which he left Dealey Plaza that day, belonged to (but was not necessarily owned by) Mrs. Paine. In that case, the question to be answered is: how did he get that impression? Using either supposition (i.e. truthful answer or false answer), it follows that Oswald alone connected "Mrs. Paine" to a conspiracy; because the truthful answer implicates at least Oswald, the Rambler's driver and Mrs. Paine in the assassination. And the false answer implicates at least Oswald and the Rambler's driver. However, Mrs. Paine's involvement is implied in Oswald's most reasonable motive for lying. Either way "Mrs. Paine" is involved.

Something I had not considered until recently is the possibility that we have been wrong about the identity of "Mrs. Paine." There are two Mrs. Paines in this story: Ruth Hyde Paine of Irving, and her mother-in-law, Ruth Forbes Paine, who is the one with more direct Dulles/CIA connections. A possible third Mrs. Paine might even be a possible wife of Secret Service Agent William Paine, the Austin based agent whom Bill Moyers has characterized as the man in charge of JFK's Dallas itinerary.

Was Oswald saying the Rambler station wagon belonged to Ruth Forbes Paine? There is an indication, based on a new piece of the puzzle, that this is something George Wing was trying to tell us. Researcher Bruce Adamson found that Ruth Forbes Paine had married a man named Arthur Young from Philadelphia. He also found correspondence between Allen Dulles and an Arthur Nichols Young, an international economist who served as financial adviser to the Chinese Nationalist Government and represented the U.S. after WWII in missions to the Middle East and Latin America.

The connection to Wing is a reference I came upon indicating that an Arthur Young was involved with Esquire magazine in some major way. I cannot find the reference now, but the connection can still be verified through research. Adamson also sent me copies of HSCA pages concerning their staff's (Fonzi's?) interview of Palm Beach stock broker Joseph Dryer, who knew de Mohrenschildt in Haiti. Dryer remembered an association between de Mohrenschildt and William Avery Hyde, Ruth Hyde Paine's father.

John Martino:

I spoke to Earl Golz on May 26, 1994. He said he couldn't remember if he ever knew the name of Martino's electronics company. Earl was more familiar with the bullet proof vest business in which Klassen and Martino were later partners. Fortunately there is another, and seemingly more promising, route to the answer. Bill Kelly told me that Robin Summers (Anthony's wife) has located Klassen and made plans to talk to him. Even more promising is that Bill Kelly has located Martino's four brothers and sister in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I think he said some of them are in the phone book.

Beverly Ann Monroe and related incidents:

She is added to my list of things to check on (see my manuscript, footnote 136), but for now it's a lower priority than getting harder evidence that Wing actually knew something. If the "No Name Key" photo is Wing, I think we can safely take Monroe out of the coincidence category. Scary thought.

Such incidents have caused me to give a lot of thought to the word "paranoia." Knowing what we know, I think researchers experience the opposite of paranoia -- rational fear. For those of us involved with the Rambler here locally, it stems from knowledge of several highly coincidental incidents which may indicate an interest in our efforts by intelligence operatives. I recently wrote about it to Sheldon Inkol, Carol Hewett, Cindy McNeill, Lou Sproesser and Bill Kelly. Before that, most of this was known only to the few of us researching the car here in Austin.

In August 1993, a man had just moved into a house down the street from where the car is kept, and said he was inquiring about the car on behalf of another man who had just moved into some apartments nearby. He did not mention it, but my friend knew that those apartments were rented on a weekly basis. As an isolated incident, of course, this is no problem.

The only one of these incidents in my manuscript is the one about Beverly Ann Monroe in footnote 136. I only wrote about it because it led to the discovery of Barbara J. Burris. That incident alone was strange enough but it may not have been isolated. Something else strange had happened three weeks prior to that. Of course I was oblivious to this connection until January 1993 when I realized the significance of the Monroe incident.

At around 4:40 p.m. on March 21, 1991, I ended a long phone call to Earl Golz. I had been telling him about meeting a woman at a party a few days earlier. The woman, Victoria S. Bacon (maiden name Gibbons or something similar), had worked in the office of security at the State Department from 1960-1964. She said she typed many documents dealing with security approvals within the State Department. We talked about Otto Otepka, Rostow, Rusk, Harold R. Isaacs and Oswald. It is too involved to go into here but our discussion of that aspect of the assassination ended when I brought up CD 1080 which seems to link Isaacs to Oswald. She said she remembers things about Isaacs that she probably should not talk about. She had learned only recently that Rostow lived in Austin.

This phone call to Earl was also the first time I had told him about George Wing and the Rambler. These were the weeks when I was beginning to see a method to Wing's madness possibly leading to Rostow. Twenty minutes after we hung up I answered a call from a woman who identified herself as Dawn Owens, a special agent for the Defense Department. She wanted to speak to my boss, David Price. I told her he was not in, and she left her local number, 834-8617. David returned to the office after a while and I gave him the message. He and I were usually the only ones who stayed late after work. He looked puzzled. He picked up his other messages from the secretary's desk and before calling her back he called his close friend Paul Burns at 5:45.

Burns is a career Secret Service agent who served on Truman's and Kennedy's White House details. As recently noted in one of Vincent Palamara's Investigator articles, Burns was on the Fort Worth leg of Kennedy's fateful Texas trip. I've known a bit more about him for several years now. At the Austin Bureau he served as the number two man under Charles E. Kunkel for many years (see p. 110 of my manuscript. I have the obituary and article in my files).

I must continue to regress for a moment to pick up a crucial detail of this story. After I wrote down Dawn's message I took it to the secretary's desk where David's phone messages were kept. I noticed that several messages had been left in the twenty minutes between my hanging up with Earl and answering Dawn's call. Thumbing through them I was shocked to see that there had been a call from someone with the CIA in Houston. There was also a call from Burns and one from Hazel Ransom (see p. 6 of my manuscript). Hazel's office was on the floor below ours. Earl and I had discussed her husband's possible CIA connections.

When David went to his desk with his messages he closed both doors to his office. This prompted me to eaves drop. That's how I know he called Burns first. He asked Burns about Dawn and what she might want. Burns didn't seem to have any answers. The phone rang again at 5:49 and David answered on the first ring. He talked for one minute and then left for the day. I stayed until about 8 p.m. then went to a researcher friend's house to tell him about this and attempt to calm down. It did not help when a helicopter flew over and shined a bright light in his front yard.

I got to work an hour early the next morning so I wouldn't miss anything. Finally at 9:05 a.m. he called Dawn Owens and left a message. He then came into the office where we made coffee and I asked him if he knew what she wanted. He said Burns had told him that someone must be getting checked out. He then told me about other Secret Service men he had known in the last twenty years. He mentioned Jim Rose, Cecil Calvin and the current Austin chief, Steve Beecham.

At 10:48 a.m. Dawn returned his call. I listened discreetly and learned that they were checking out the son of a close friend of David's, Michael Brewer, whose father Dave Brewer was the former head of purchasing for the university. David speculated that he was applying for a sensitive job. At the time, this explanation seemed innocent enough. But I never heard any more about the CIA man in Houston or what Hazel Ransom had called about. And as I discovered by chance two years after this, it occurred only three weeks before the "Barbara Burris" incident.

By that time (January 1993) other stranger things had happened. On July 31, 1991, at the age of 55, David died of a previously undetected aortal aneurysm while being prepped for an angioplasty operation at Seton Memorial Hospital in Austin. He had been admitted to emergency the day before when his blood pressure soared high enough to turn his face red. He had been undergoing medical tests and experiments of blood pressure medication levels for months.

After his death a vice president who had never liked David temporarily took over our office and ended many of David's easy-going policies, including one allowing us to freelance on our own time. This was clearly aimed at me since I was the only one taking advantage of the policy at that time. I was also having a successful and highly publicized one-man show of my art work. The show was in Harry Ransom's former office near the LBJ Library.

I resigned over that and a few other changes which had made my future at UT impossible. I gave seven days notice, was locked out of my office the next day, and was eventually replaced by a man named Joe London. London, I came to learn, is reportedly a former Army Intelligence assassin who was stationed in Vietnam. He was also overqualified for my former position and apparently did not need the job since he was a partner in his own business with another man I knew, Jay Lake.

They operate a graphic design studio called "The Good Art Company" which is in a part of downtown devoid of art studios but surrounded by high-power law firms, temporary state Senate offices and a state police organization. It is also a short walk from where Rachel Oswald worked at the time. And where, according to a guy who dated her, "she feels safe." London has another business doing digital scanning of artwork called "Honest Joe's Scans." So much for zero-tolerance of outside artwork. I only had a couple of freelance clients.

Since February 1992, London has been in a position to learn a great deal about what I knew, up to the time I left, about the Rambler. I had given copies of my file memos to a former friend and co-worker who got his job there on my recommendation ten years earlier. He repaid the favor by lying about his participation with me in an effort to blow the whistle on government waste in our office. He kissed up to the vice president who was calling the shots because he and his wife had four kids to support. His own occasional freelancing was overlooked and he was appointed the new head of the department. It was under those circumstance that he hired London.

I also knew some interesting things about London's business partner, Jay Lake. I had met Jay a couple of years earlier when we tried to start a Macintosh users group. I knew that Jay's father was Joe Lake, the number three man in the Bush State Department under Baker and Eagleburger.

That is, until President Bush appointed him ambassador to Mongolia very quietly during the Gulf War. I also knew that many of Jay's relatives were CIA employees. Even today Mongolia is a likely launching ground for covert operations aimed at China and the former Soviet Union. Lake must have accomplished his mission there because he was recently appointed by President Clinton as ambassador to Albania.

A March 1994 development to all of this involves John Palese, the Nash Car Club of America chapter president. He is the first and only NCCA person to call me after a year of membership. A membership that had lapsed I might add. Naturally he asked about our Rambler. Keep in mind that he was visiting his son who is a local graphic designer -- like me, Joe London, Jay Lake, and my friend who has the car in his driveway.

The same morning Palese called I received a call to do an illustration for 3M's local ad agency, Kamstra Communications. Jay Lake had recently become employed there as their computer expert. When I arrived at Kamstra that afternoon to pick up a file of photos, the art director who hired me "lost" the file and kept me waiting in the lobby while he looked for it.

While I was waiting, Jay came out and sat in the chair next to mine and started making small talk while looking at The Wall Street Journal. We had not talked in years. That's when I learned about his dad's recent job change. The art director came out shortly and we had our meeting. He said the "lost" file had been on his desk the whole time.

This illustration job was the latest of a spate of recent jobs from this agency. These two calls also came the morning after I had called John Judge late the previous night to confirm that I was coming to the COPA meeting.

There are some other interesting stories to tell about incidents during this period. One happened the night after our small group of researchers met in January 1993 to decide whether to present our findings at Providence. One member of our group (who must remain anonymous) was given a message at a local restaurant. The maitre d' came to his table and said that the gentleman across the room said to say hello and that he sees him everywhere he goes. Our member did not recognize the man but discovered the next day that he was a member of his downtown social club. He recognized the man's name though. He was Howard Burris, Jr.! A couple of days later we confirmed that he is the Howard Lay Burris, Jr.! For obvious reasons this researcher has stayed in touch with Burris but we do not know who is spying on whom.

There is also reason to believe that LBJ loyalists who now protect Lady Bird are aware of our research. Near the end of February I got a call from my former college illustration instructor about a job he had recommended me for. He had been approached by Liz Carpenter who wanted an authentic Texas artist to illustrate her new book being published by Random House. He turned down the job because he felt his style was not humorous enough for the book's subject matter. He thought mine was.

I contacted Ms. Carpenter's secretary who recognized my name and said I had come highly recommended. She asked me to fax some samples of my work. I sent them along with a resume and the Austin paper's review of my 1991 art show. The reviewer pointed out that I was probably the only artist anywhere specializing in caricatures of famous Texans.

After a few days I called to verify that the materials had been received. The secretary said they had and were being discussed. That is the last I heard about it. It is unusual to be left hanging like that. The secretary was very happy when I first called because they were "desperate" to find an artist.

Knowing Ms. Carpenter's long career in journalism I knew from the beginning that it was likely she would check further into my background. It would not have been difficult for her to come across Earl Golz's November 22, 1993 Austin American-Statesman article about me and the Rambler. Basically that is why we pay attention to anyone asking about the Rambler. And that is why we think its theft would not have a totally innocent meaning. And that is also why we are fatalistic about security.

- END OF 1994 UPDATE -

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