Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Larry Paul, a firearms expert with thirty years of experience with the Philadelphia and Los Angeles police departments, told me he had never heard of a glass bullet. And plastic bullets, he said, weren’t manufactured until “the late sixties or early seventies and are only used as training ammunition. This is because they are fired without gunpowder—only a primer in the shell is used—and there is minimum velocity and minimum amount of impact and destructive capability. No assassin would ever use such a bullet.” Paul added that all the plastic bullets he had ever seen were painted black, so they “would be visible in X-rays.” But even if they weren’t, he noted that the “wad” (the plastic component of a shotgun shell) frequently appears in X-rays, “even when they are white, and not painted a different color.”16

  Wecht’s theory about frangible bullets only pertains to the shot to the president’s head. He has never suggested that such a bullet may have entered the president’s throat, and he confirmed this position in our telephone conversations. “If it had been a frangible bullet, there would have been much more soft-tissue damage in the area of the president’s throat and neck,” he said. I therefore said to him, “Doctor, you’ve always said you believed there was only one gunman firing from the president’s right. You’ve never suggested two gunmen there, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But if the shot that you originally thought may have struck the president in the throat was not a frangible bullet, yet the synchronized bullet that you say may have struck the president on the right side of his head may have been, you’d have to have two gunmen on the president’s right side, one firing frangible bullets, the other regular ones.”

  “Yes.”

  “You agree this is pretty far-fetched, don’t you?”

  “I agree that would not be likely at all,” Dr. Wecht acknowledged, still not backing down, however, from his rejection of the single-bullet theory, only being forced into the conclusion that both gunmen were firing from the president’s rear.

  What all of the above shows, of course, is that in addition to the points made in the previous section—that there is no credible evidence whatsoever that any shots were fired from the president’s right side or right front (grassy knoll), and the selection of the general area around the knoll as the site from which to shoot the president makes absolutely no sense at all—the conspiracy theorists’ leading medical forensic expert cannot even hypothesize a shooting from the right side or right front that is intellectually sustainable. Even with as fine a forensic mind as Dr. Wecht’s, by definition no one can defend a position that is indefensible.

  Secret Service Agents on the Grassy Knoll

  Although the notion of a grassy knoll assassin has no basis in the evidence or common sense, before we move on we must discuss one of the very most enduring of all grassy knoll allegations. Three members of Dallas law enforcement testified before the Warren Commission that after the shooting they encountered Secret Service agents behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll as well as behind the Book Depository Building. The immediate problem that presents itself is that, as the Warren Commission found, “none [of the sixteen Secret Service agents protecting the president] stayed at the scene of the shooting…Secret Service procedure requires that each agent stay with the person being protected and not be diverted unless it is necessary to accomplish the protective assignment. Forrest V. Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Dallas office, was the first Secret Service agent to return to the scene of the assassination, approximately 20 or 25 minutes after the shots were fired.”1

  The HSCA likewise stated, “Except for Dallas [Secret Service] Agent-in-Charge [Forrest] Sorrels, who helped police search the Texas School Book Depository, no agent was in the vicinity of the stockade fence or inside the book depository on the day of the assassination.”2

  The conspiracy theorists have naturally alleged that these Secret Service impersonators were involved in the assassination, and hence, there was a conspiracy. What, specifically, did the Dallas law enforcement witnesses say? An examination of their testimony and interviews reveals that they are not quite as unambiguous as conspiracy theorists have led people to believe. Dallas County deputy constable Seymour Weitzman testified that after the shooting he ran into the parking lot in the railroad yards behind the grassy knoll, where he saw “other officers, Secret Service as well,” and he later turned over what looked to him “like human bone” found on Elm Street to “one of the Secret Service men.”3 But in a report on his 1978 interview of Weitzman, HSCA investigator Leodis C. Matthews writes that Weitzman said “he did not know if the man was a law enforcement agent or not. I reminded him of his testimony before the Warren Commission identifying the person as a Secret Service agent. He recalled that he just didn’t know who it was.”4

  Dallas police officer D. V. Harkness testified that around 12:36 p.m., six minutes after the shooting, he was in the back of the Book Depository Building and saw “some Secret Service agents there. I didn’t get them identified. They told me they were Secret Service.”5 But again, in a report on his 1978 interview with Harkness, HSCA investigator Harold Rose writes that “Harkness told me that there was quite a bit of confusion and he would have to say that he may have assumed that the men were Secret Service. They could have been from some other agency.”6

  Dallas police officer Joe M. Smith testified that after the shooting he was one of the first officers who ran into the railroad yards* behind the fence to look around. He said, “Of course, I wasn’t alone. There was some deputy sheriff with me, and I believe one Secret Service man when I got there.” Smith said that because a woman had told him just before he went behind the fence that “they are shooting the President from the bushes,” he pulled his pistol from his holster and approached the man he believed to be a Secret Service agent. But “I thought, this is silly, I don’t know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me [presumably with his badge] that he was a Secret Service agent.”

  Warren Commission counsel: “Did you accost this man?”

  Smith: “Well, he saw me coming with my pistol and right away he showed me who he was.”

  Warren Commission counsel: “Do you remember who it was?”

  Smith: “No, sir, I don’t, because then we [presumably Smith, the deputy sheriff, and the “Secret Service” agent] started checking the cars.”7

  Note that Smith said he believed (not that he was sure) the man was a Secret Service agent. Also, he doesn’t say how the person showed him who he was. It almost undoubtedly was by displaying a badge, but unless Smith examined the badge closely and saw the words Secret Service on it (which he had no reason to do, particularly in the frenzy of the moments following the shooting), Smith may have assumed the man was a Secret Service agent and therefore further assumed that the badge was a Secret Service badge when it could very well have been the badge of some other law enforcement agency.

  Several people could have been the person Officer Smith encountered behind the picket fence. FBI special agent James P. Hosty told the committee that Frank Ellsworth, a plainclothes Dallas agent for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit of the Treasury Department (the predecessor to today’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), told him that he had been in the grassy knoll area right after the shooting and for some reason had identified himself to someone as a Secret Service agent.8 But when the HSCA took Ellsworth’s deposition, he denied telling Hosty this, adding, however, that “when ATF agents were detailed [to] Secret Service on the presidential protection, we were commonly mistaken for Secret Service agents.”9 Between Hosty and Ellsworth, whom should one believe? Experience with human nature would tell us that Hosty wouldn’t have any reason to lie about what he said Ellsworth told him, whereas we know how very common it is for people to deny something that would be embarrassing to them. (The reason Hosty had contact with Ellsworth is that Ellsworth was the Treasury Department agent in Dallas whose investigative responsibilities included illegal trafficking i
n firearms and explosives in the Dallas region, and Hosty was his FBI contact. In fact, both Hosty and Ellsworth told the HSCA that they had met the very morning of the assassination to discuss the possible theft of rifles at nearby Fort Hood involving right-wing elements.)

  What has to be taken into consideration is that, as the HSCA said, “because the Dallas Police Department had numerous plainclothes detectives on duty in the Dealey Plaza area, the Committee considered it possible that they were mistaken for Secret Service agents.”10 Several of these Dallas Police Department detectives, we can reasonably assume, went to investigate behind the grassy knoll. And many plainclothes detectives from other local and federal agencies, all with badges, were also in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting and went to investigate in various areas of the plaza. For example, Dallas deputy sheriff Roger Craig, a plainclothes officer, testified that he “ran up to the railroad yard and—uh—started to look around.”11 Dallas deputy sheriff Luke Mooney testified that immediately after the shooting, he and fellow deputy Ralph Walters “jumped over the [picket] fence and went into the railroad yards…and began to look around there.” He said that “of course, there were other officers…there.” Two of the officers, he said, were “Webster and…Vickery…They were plainclothes officers like myself.” He added, “We were trying to clear the area out and get all the civilians out that [weren’t] officers.”12

  I couldn’t find any record of Mooney having ever spoken to the media or assassination researchers through the years, and when I tried to reach him through the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, he was not amenable to talking to me. Finally, through the intercession of a friend of his, former Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, who had promised me he would “deliver” Mooney to me, I got Mooney on the phone for a few minutes on the afternoon of March 15, 2000. He is a very plainspoken man of few words who clearly wants to put his limited role in the assassination inquiry behind him. I really only had one important question to ask him. Were there any Secret Service agents in the railroad yards behind the picket fence after the shooting? “If there were, I didn’t see them,” Mooney said. I told him about the allegation by conspiracy theorists that Secret Service agents were there. “That’s all bull,” he responded, then added, “but now, I only looked around the area for two or three minutes before I left for the Book Depository Building. So I can’t say who was there after I left.” But while he was there, the only plainclothes officers in the yards besides himself whom he remembers by name were “Sam Webster, Ralph Walters [both now deceased], and Bill Vickery [I was unable to locate Vickery].” When I reminded him of his Warren Commission testimony that besides these three officers there were “other officers” in the yards, but “who they were, I don’t recall at this time,” and asked him if these other officers were plainclothes officers, he told me they were. “Could they have been from the Secret Service?” I questioned. “No,” he said, “they definitely were all from my department, but I wasn’t with them, and I don’t recall who they were. But they were our boys.”13

  Mooney was in the yards for a very brief period. Undoubtedly, other plainclothes detectives from other agencies came there after Mooney left.

  And according to a January 14, 1964, memorandum from Carl R. Booth Jr., the supervisor in charge of the Dallas office of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit of the Treasury Department, to Forrest Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Dallas office of the Secret Service, right after the shooting, nine of his investigators (all plainclothes) “ran from our offices…to the Texas School Book Depository Building…[and] participated in [the] search.” One of the nine officers listed in the memo is the aforementioned Frank Ellsworth.14 That one or more of these officers also went to the railroad yards behind the grassy knoll is not unlikely.

  More significantly, the HSCA also learned from the testimony of Robert E. Jones, a retired army lieutenant colonel who was the operations officer for the 112th Military Intelligence Group headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, in 1963, that on the day of the assassination, his group “provided a small force…between eight and twelve” men to “augment” the Secret Service protection of the president. Jones said this was not unusual. That “at any time the president, or vice president” or anyone else under Secret Service protection would come to the area, the Secret Service would contact his group to assist in the protection of the subject official. He said on November 22, 1963, all of his men, who “were under the control and supervision of the Secret Service,” were in plainclothes and carried credentials, which included a photograph of themselves. If asked to identify themselves, they would “identify themselves as special agent John Doe and present their credentials,” an identification that clearly could have made one assume that they were Secret Service agents. He said if the identification went further, they would say “they were working in conjunction with the Secret Service,” but would not be authorized to say they were Secret Service agents, adding, however, he could not vouch that they did not do so. Jones testified he did not know where his detail of men were around the time of the shooting. “Some of them may have accompanied the motorcade and some of them may have stayed there [in Dealey Plaza]. Some of them may have been with the Secret Service. Some of our agents may have been with the FBI.”15

  The HSCA said it “sought to identify these agents so that they could be questioned. The Department of Defense, however, reported its files showed ‘no records…indicating any Department of Defense Protective Services in Dallas [on the day of the assassination].’ The Committee was unable to resolve the contradiction.”16

  The person Dallas police officer Joe Smith took to be a Secret Service agent in the parking lot behind the picket fence could easily have been one of Colonel Jones’s men from the 112th Military Intelligence Group who was assigned to assist the Secret Service that day. But perhaps the most likely candidate for the person Smith confronted—a person whose identity has bewildered students of the assassination for over four decades—was James W. Powell, at the time of the assassination a Specialist E4 for the same 112th Military Intelligence Group who was stationed in Dallas but not assigned to protect the president that day. Powell told HSCA investigators in 1978 that he had taken the day off to see the president and was in his civilian clothes standing on the southeast corner of Elm and Houston when the president was shot. When someone in the crowd pointed to the Texas School Book Depository exclaiming the shots came from that direction, he took a picture of the building. Powell then “ran across the street and followed a group running towards the railroad tracks” because someone said the shots came from that direction.17 In an interview with an investigator from the ARRB in 1996, Powell elaborated on this. He said the specific area he ran to was “the parking area” (i.e., behind the picket fence) and he ran there with some police officers and sheriff’s deputies. Most importantly, when he was asked whether he showed anyone his identification at that time, he replied, “I recall that I, I basically recall that I did, because the officers were curious as to why I was joining them and I just flashed my credentials to show them.” He said his ID was “a fold-out type,” and when the ARRB investigator asked, “Something like this?” (described for the record as a “wallet-type credential showing the owner’s picture and employing federal agency”), Powell said, “Like that exactly.” Powell said he assumes he said what he normally did when showing his credentials: “I’m a special agent” or “I’m a special agent with Military Intelligence.” Powell said that after he and the others checked the parking lot area and “didn’t see anything obvious,” he went back to the Book Depository Building, where he called his office.18

  And, indeed, when the FBI interviewed Powell way back on January 3, 1964, he identified himself as a “special agent” for Army Intelligence.19 The probability is substantial that the person Dallas police officer Joe Smith encountered behind the picket fence whom he took to be a Secret Service agent was none other than James W. Powell.

  With respect to the issue of whether
a Secret Service agent was behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, the story of Special Agent Thomas “Lem” Johns has to be told. Johns was riding in the vice presidential security car (right behind the vice president’s car), the fourth car in the motorcade. When the Warren Commission said that “none [of the Secret Service agents protecting the president] stayed at the scene of the shooting,” it forgot about Johns, who stayed there for awhile, though unwillingly. As Johns explained it in a November 29, 1963, memorandum to Secret Service chief James Rowley, when the second shot rang out, he leaped out of his car to run to the vice president’s car, saying, “I felt that if there was danger due to the slow speed of the motorcade, I would be of more assistance and in a more proper location with the Vice President’s car.” But he said that “before I reached the Vice President’s car, a third shot had sounded and the entire motorcade then picked up speed and I was left on the street at this point.” Johns doesn’t say how long he remained at the assassination scene or what he did while he was there, only adding in his report, “I obtained a ride with White House movie men and joined the Vice President and ASAIC [Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Rufus] Youngblood at the Parkland Hospital.”20

  However, in 1989, NBC cameraman David Wiegman, who had been in one of the press cars in the motorcade, told author Richard Trask that after the shooting he jumped out of his car and when he saw the police officer getting off his motorcycle and running up the slope toward the pergola on Elm, “I figured he knows something’s up there, so I ran up there. I found myself there with Lem [Secret Service Agent Johns] close by, a few feet away…Lem was sort of looking around. Couldn’t see anything. I knew now I’d better get…some footage. I saw these people lying on the ground, and I took them. I saw a lady being pulled down to the ground…You could sense she just wanted to get away from there, and somebody pulled her down.” Note that there’s no indication that Wiegman (and Johns, who allegedly was just a few feet away) ran to the parking lot and railroad yard area behind the picket fence, where Dallas police officer Joe Smith supposedly saw the “Secret Service” agent, only that he ran to the top of the slope. And the people Wiegman refers to as seeing lying on the ground were on the street side of the fence and pergola, not in the parking lot area on the other side.