The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s London File on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Calendared & Glossed
by Anthony Frewin
‘Calendared and Glossed’ is pretty elegant, is it not? And totally accurate, of course. In his ‘Author’s Note’ Frewin tells us that this began as an idea for a Lobster piece but, like Topsy, it grew and grew to almost 40 A4 pages. There is no ‘smoking gun’; indeed, there is not much of direct consequence for assassination buffs at all. The author comments in his ‘afterword’, ‘There is nothing in these files that the Cub Scouts of America could not have achieved at a fraction of the cost.’ But, complete with Frewinesque digressions – my favourite is note 2, on a book called The History of Hitchin – and annotations, I found this parade of bureaucratic lacunae and minutiae oddly compelling.
There are two discoveries of significance here. The first is a reference to ‘Mr Scott, the Editor of Security Gazette’. What is the ‘Security Gazette’, with whom the 1964 FBI in London was ‘maintain[ing] good relations’? The second concerns the late John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College at Oxford for many years, on whom there is a substantial appendix. Sparrow, one of the earliest UK defenders of the Warren Commission, was in touch with the US Embassy at this time, talked with ‘Embassy officials’ about this subject; and heeded their advice and agreed not to debate the Warren Commission conclusions with Mark Lane on TV. Frewin notes that Sparrow later had a book defending Warren published by a US company called Chilmark Press, an imprint which thus far has resisted investigation. Mr Sparrow has CIA written all over him and is probably worth a serious study by somebody.
This is ring-bound, typeset, with a clear protective plastic cover, and is published by Last Hurrah Press, 937 Memorial Avenue, Williamsport, PA 17701, USA, at $15.00.
Elders and Betters
Skeptical Inquirer is the journal of the American so-called quack-busting organisation, CSICOP, fronted by, amongst others, the magician James Randi. In the March/April 1995 issue there is a report on CSICOP’s annual conference, a chunk of which was devoted to the ritual trashing of the poor, demented, conspiracy buff by a couple of the incisive brains of the CSICOP. In one A4 page, their speakers, Melanie Klein and Don Yates, as reported in the magazine, made the following errors:
- Called the author of Crossfire, Jim Morrison, not Jim Marrs.
- Claimed that LBJ and Jackie Kennedy spent the whole flight from Dallas to Washington in the plane with the dead JFK’s body (‘were with the body the entire trip’). This is offered as falsifying ‘one theory……that a brain showing bullets from one direction was substituted during the flight from Dallas to Washington.’ Which theory is this, then? It sounds a bit like a scrambled version of David Lifton’s theory. In any case, from Manchester’s The Death of a President (pp. 368-370, UK hardback) and Lifton’s Best Evidence (pp. 677 and 678, Carroll and Graf, US softback) it is simply not true that LBJ and Jackie Kennedy stayed with the corpse all the way. Mrs Kennedy travelled with the body in the rear of the plane, President Johnson with his wife and colleagues further forward. (See the floor plan in Lifton, p. 676.)
- Claimed that there is nothing to the idea that the backwards motion of the President’s head upon bullet impact indicates a shot from the front.
‘True believers, like many ordinary people, derive their ideas of what bullets do from Hollywood where victims are portrayed as being picked up and thrown backwards by the bullet. Bullets cannot do that. If they had that much energy, Newton’s law of equal and opposite reaction (sic) would mean that the shooter would be knocked backward too.’
This is a classic ‘straw man’ manoeuvre: Kennedy’s head was not ‘picked up and thrown backwards’. As for the shooter being knocked backward… Yes, the shooter would be knocked backwards if the bullet was prevented from going forward, but it isn’t. The energy released by the propellant is transferred to the unhindered projectile. The authors do not even understand basic ballistics.
- They noted:
‘Oliver Stone’s JFK asserted that the bullet would have had to follow a zigzag course to hit both JFK and Governor Connally. That would be true only if you assume that they were sitting straight forward like graven images. If you assume instead that they were acting like politicians, turning and waving to the crowd, they would be lined up perfectly for the shot from the school book depository.’
But we don’t need to assume anything. We have the Zapruder movie which has been examined frame by frame. Or didn’t they think of that?
- They noted:
‘True believers also ask why, if the bullet passed through both men, it was not more distorted. Kates [one of the speakers] quoted from a standard forensic text, unrelated to the Kennedy assassination. “Full metal jacketed rounds tend to pass through the body intact, thus producing less extensive injuries than hunting ammunition. It is possible for such bullets to pass through more than one individual before coming to rest. These bullets may be almost virginal in appearance after recovery.” Actually the Kennedy bullet showed some deformation.’
Kates appears to be unaware of the extensive tests done by the FBI to replicate the feat of the bullet passing through two bodies, breaking numerous bones on the way, and emerging undamaged. They never succeeded. One of these test bullets, the well known Commission Exhibit 856, is reproduced in Lifton’s Best Evidence, among the photographs at the beginning of part 3. Fired through the wrist of a corpse – thus replicating, roughly, part of its journey through Connally’s wrist, breaking bones en route, – 856 was badly damaged by the impact with the wrist bone.
As for the bullet, Commission Exhibit 399, which passed through Kennedy and Connally showing ‘some deformation’, it depends, I guess, on what you take ‘some’ to mean. To the naked eye there is none at all. Maybe to a microscope…. CE 399 is reproduced in Lifton next to the deformed test bullet 856. It was the fact that 399 emerged pristine which made the FBI attempts to replicate its condition necessary.
- They claimed that ‘Jim Morrison (sic) in his book Crossfire says that the body buried in Oswald’s grave was not really Oswald’s.’ Well, I haven’t read Crossfire but I asked Tony Frewin, who has. And, nope, Marrs does not say this. He discusses the theory but does not agree with it.
CSICOP people love Kennedy-buff bashing. CSICOP Executive Council member, Joe Nickell, is the co-author, with John F. Fischer, of Mysterious Realms (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1992) a chapter of which is devoted to the sport. Nickell spends 98% of the chapter to rubbishing the late Michael Eddowes’ theories about the ‘second Oswald’, something an averagely bright first year student could do. He then blithely dismisses all the rest of the literature in twelve lines! This is awesomely incompetent – or simply dishonest(1).
And these are the people from whom we are supposed to take instructions on rationality and research methodology? Give me a break! As for CSICOP being CIA, as some suspect, surely the Agency could come up with some more competent people….
Van the Man
In Lobster 27 I noted that Scott van Wynsberghe had graduated from writing for Lobster (see number 24) to one of Canada’s leading daily papers, the Globe and Mail; and had done so by changing his mind and accepting that the Warren Commission was correct.
In the Globe and Mail of January 21 this year there is another large piece by Mr Van Wynsberghe, ‘Memoirs of a former conspiracy theorist’. You can get a whiff of this from its subtitle: John F Kennedy’s Assassination is still a magnet for every popeyed wahoo clinging to a theory incriminating Freemasons, UFOs, Nazi satanists, psychic cliques and the abominable snowman.’
This is a wonderful (bad and good ‘wonderful’) exercise in guilt by association. Some of the piece will be familiar to Lobster readers, for Van Wynsberghe began his intellectual odyssey, in print, anyway, in Lobster 24 with his ‘Occult thinking in the JFK Assassination’ (bits of which are recycled here). In that piece he mocked some of the loopier people who get interested in the assassination – and conspiracy theories – in general. It was an interesting and amusing piece. This new one is interesting but its attack on some of the other, more serious, researchers is not.
After acknowledging that ‘no community should be judged by its lunatic fringe’, Wynsberghe tells us that but by about 1992 he had ‘begun to realize that the conspiracy field had almost no non-lunatic centre, leaving it completely open to fringe theories…… all the wild theorists had drawn together into a single, pulsating mass of cosmic silliness.’ (emphasis added.)
For most of the serious researchers in the field, the wacky theories in the JFK case are just part of the mildly amusing (sometimes), mildly irritating (sometimes), background noise to the case. Somehow they have been turned up so loudly that they are now all that Wynsberghe can hear.
The serious researchers interested in conspiracies are a problem to Mr Van Wynsberghe. There are lots of them and they undermine his thesis. He complains that ‘even respectable assassination theorists such as Anthony Summers …..and John H. Davis’ made ‘little effort to clean out the wackier fringe’. What does this mean? Are they supposed to police the subject? How do you do that – even assuming for the moment it was a good idea?
He moves on to Vincent Salandria, Sylvia Meagher and Mark Lane, three of the early critics of the Warren Commission. Salandria ‘soon found that liberals were not interested in what he had to say. So has he stopped saying it? Of course not; he has shifted to conservative audiences. The trouble is that some of those audiences are extremely conservative.’
What does this mean? Salandria talks to the fascists? Not quite fascists? No names? No details so we can decide?
Lane gets the same treatment for – you can guess – going into court to defend US magazine The Spotlight, when it was sued by Watergate burglar Howard Hunt. (Lane’s book about this event is reviewed in Lobster 23, p. 35 (2)
So, if two early JFK theorists are now hob-nobbing with the far right, a third was hob-nobbing with the KGB. For the late Ms Meagher, Van Wynsberghe tells us, wrote for an American journal called Minority of One. I confess that before this year I had never heard of this journal. However, like Van Wynsberghe, I have seen the Kalugin memoir (reviewed in this issue) in which he reveals KGB subsidy of Minority of One. Though quite what this tells us about Ms Meagher is not clear to me: Ms Meagher presumably was unaware of this subsidy. At any rate Van W. has no evidence that she was.
In his final paragraphs Van Wynsberghe adds Lobster and Alex Cox to his line-up of dupes and villains. Lobster ‘began running reports on psychic cliques in the Pentagon’.
I did?
Not quite.
And poor old Cox ‘maintained that there was a fascist conspiracy in the U.S. security establishment to encourage belief in UFO’s’.
He did? Not quite.
Notes
- Thanks to Tony Frewin for spotting this.
- There is a profile of Spotlight founder, Willis Carto, in Covert Action Quarterly no. 51 This profile makes it crystal clear, once again, that Carto is a racist and something like a fascist. It is still unclear to me whether the likes of Mark Lane and Victor Marchetti, who have worked with Carto, are aware of his real agenda. COQ is at 1500 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, number 732, Washington DC 20005, USA.