by J. W Lateer
Mr. Sonnett [attorney for the Committee]: Would you read that letter into the record?
(Mr. Kersten reads the letter):
Mr. Kersten: “Dear Senator Kennedy [referring to Sen Edward Kennedy] Believing that it may be difficult for a letter of mine to be seen by the President, I am taking the liberty of enclosing a copy which I respectfully request you call to his attention. Sincerely, Charles Kersten.
Mr. Sonnett: Now, will you refer to the letter [by you to] President Kennedy of November 7, 1963, next to that document, and read that into the record?
Mr. Kersten: Dear Mr. President: The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee has been contemplating a hearing in Munich about the murder of the Ukrainian underground leader, Stepan Bandera by former Soviet agent Bogdan Stashynsky.… He was tried for murder in the German High Court at Karlsruhe in October-November 1962. I [Kersten] participated in the trial as counsel for Mrs. Bandera, the victim’s wife.… The facts of the case are unique. Stashynsky received intensive training as a KGB killer of anti-communist leaders in the Free World…
Former Congressman Kersten was giving a strong warning to JFK. And it wasn’t just a warning sent to JFK. He also warned both Robert F. Kennedy and “Theodore Kennedy” [Edward M. Kennedy]. Kersten warned that Soviet agents, trained for assassination, were out to get the leaders of the free world. And all this happened just two weeks before the assassination of JFK.
So, does this raise any red flags in the mind of the reader? In fact, this was literally a “red flag,” a real Communist red flag. And it was being waved in the face of the President and his brothers just 15 days before JFK was murdered. Was this just a coincidence?
And who was former Congressman Charles Kersten? Few Americans have ever heard the name Charles Kersten. Why was he bringing up the topic of Soviet assassination just two weeks prior to the JFK assassination? We will also find out about the strange case mentioned by Congressman Kersten; the case of defector Bogdan Stashynsky. Why did the case of Stashynsky (who was an alleged Soviet-trained assassin), follow such a precise and suspicious timetable?
There was a bizarre chain of events which began in 1959 with the death of Ukrainian hero Stepan Bandera. Next came a trial of Stashynsky for the alleged murder before the Supreme Court of Germany. After the trial, Senator Thomas J Dodd traveled back and forth to Germany. Was Dodd trying to call attention to this fictional Soviet murder plan? In 1967, Senator Dodd was censured by the Senate. In the censure hearings, a disturbing fact came to light. Dodd has a close relationship with certain ex-Nazi’s in Germany. He was making a desperate attempt to meet with them just prior to the death of JFK.
Now, let’s take another prime bit of very suggestive evidence.
In 1968, journalist Eric Norden obtained a unique interview with the leader of the Minutemen, which was a home-grown American terrorist organization. The name of the leader was Robert DePugh. The interview by Eric Norden was published by Playboy magazine. It also appeared in the Twentieth Anniversary Playboy Reader (1969):
Quoting DePugh: “I’ve often thought of writing a book called 1001 Ways to Kill a Man Without Using Firearms – dedicated to Senator Dodd, of course.”
Why did DePugh make that veiled reference to Senator Dodd? Did DePugh know all about Dodd and the Stashynsky case? We know that as leader of the Minutemen, DePugh was connected to many members of the extreme right. The title of the article in Playboy was “The Paramilitary Right.”
Some people may argue that the activities of Senator Dodd regarding the Stashynsky case were only for the purpose of creating a general fear of the alleged Soviet murder program. Maybe Dodd didn’t know who the victim would be. Legally Dodd, by his actions, could have been convicted of being an accessory to murder. In the legal definition of accessory to a crime, it includes anyone who participates in a cover up before the act, but not necessarily in a cover up after the fact. It would be naïve to think that Dodd didn’t know the details. My verdict: at least suspicious and very possibly guilty!
In his monumental 780 page book General Walker: And The Murder Of President Kennedy, Dr. Jeffrey Caulfield makes a very persuasive case about Lee Harvey Oswald. Caulfield wrote that during his time in New Orleans, Oswald was acting according to a plan. That plan was carefully designed by Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi. It was a cynical plan designed to brand dozens of civil-rights groups in the South as Communist. This plan could have destroyed these groups before the courts. How was Eastland intending to prove these groups were Communist? Eastland was going to prove that all of these groups were associated with a young Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald.
Senator Eastland was not just a minor figure. Eastland was a formidable power in the Senate: he was Majority Leader and Chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. Eastland was also the official chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. And Senator Thomas Dodd was the permanent Acting Chairman of that same subcommittee. Eastland and Dodd were, to all appearances, partners in crime.
The personal papers of Senator Eastland were donated upon his death to the Law School at the University of Mississippi. The papers were locked in a room. No researcher or historian was allowed to see them for 50 years. When they were finally revealed, they had been severely “sanitized.”
This is just some of the evidence. There is much more.
Author Joan Mellen recently published a book entitled Farewell to Justice. This book is a study of the Jim Garrison investigation into the JFK assassination. The climax of the Garrison investigation was the prosecution of Clay Shaw (a New Orleans businessman) for participating in the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Shaw was acquitted. However, the information developed by Garrison served to prove that there was a conspiracy to murder JFK. One of the major revelations published by Jim Garrison in his book On The Trail Of The Assassins was information about a shadowy organization called Permindex. Permindex was a front organization which had a mysterious subsidiary known as Centro Mondiale Commerciale. “Centro” was first located in Rome. Then it was banished to Switzerland. Eventually it moved on to South Africa under the protection of the South African apartheid government.
In her book, Joan Mellen states that Centro was a CIA front. Mellen reports that “in the ranks of Permindex were actual Nazi’s and Neo Nazis.” In the Garrison investigation, Guy Banister was one of three major suspects. Mellen quotes (Banister operative) Tommy Baumler who said “those who killed John F. Kennedy were those who wanted to kill [Charles] de Gaulle.”
Remember also the Kersten threats? Kersten wrote of Soviet plans to murder leaders of the free world. There were, in fact, three major assassination attempts against the French President starting in late 1961 and ending in September 1963. They were funded by an anonymous group known only as “The Old General Staff” and the money was passed through one single person. The true source of this money is, to this day, unproven.
There is another book which is a “must read” for any student of the Kennedy assassination and American history. The name of the book is The New Germany and the Old Nazis, and the author is T. H. Tetens. Tetens was a veteran scholar who specialized in the geopolitics of Germany. Author Tetens lists three things that our State Department wanted us to believe about Germany:
(1) the decision to make defeated Germany into an ally was a good decision
(2) the Germans had changed profoundly and had developed a truly democratic society and,
(3) Dr. Konrad Adenauer [was] a leader whose counsel was sought throughout the world.
Tetens believed that none of these things were true. He was one of the leading experts and scholars on German geopolitics. He was a veteran of 30 year’s research and had worked on the War Crimes Commission from 1946-1948.
Tetens also had something to say about “Centro.” According to Tetens, in the 1950’s and the 1960’s there was an organization of ex-[military] officers, high government officials, jurists, educators, industrialists and church leaders from Germany It was cal
led the “Committee for Justice and Trade.” Tetens states “According to [a] report in the Deutsche Soldaten Zeitung, this group was closely affiliated with a propaganda center in Switzerland, the Centro Europa…” Tetens describes “Centro” as a relief organization for former Nazi war criminals around the world.
Add to the mix the following: the same Nazi Deutsche Soldaten Zeitung (a/k/a National Zeitung) which was mentioned by Tetens, was also mentioned by assassination author Dr. Caulfield in his book General Walker.
Writes Caulfield, “while Walker was in Shreveport, [11-23-63], miraculously, an obscure Nazi-oriented German Newspaper, The National Zeitung, located him [Walker] and interviewed him…” The newspaper even had Walker’s hotel room number and Walker hadn’t given it to them.
We have already seen a very tangled web. Senator Dodd and former Congressman Charles Kersten were closely involved with certain people in Germany. These people were dealing with assassinations and in particular, the possible assassinations of free world leaders. This list of free world leaders would probably include Charles de Gaulle or John F. Kennedy. And added to this, the leader of the Minutemen, Robert DePugh, seemed to link Senator Dodd to the subject of assassinations. What did DePugh know about Senator Dodd and how did he find out? Did DePugh read the record of the censure hearings against Dodd? Why would he do that? Or did DePugh know all the true details about the role of Dodd in the JFK murder from some other source?
In later chapters, we will explore all these clues and leads in depth. We will for the first time, explain the actions of the two JFK whistleblowers who worked for military intelligence. These two tried to blow the whistle and to foil the assassination. We will also hope to explain for the first time what motivated Jack Ruby to murder Oswald. As we untangle this web of intrigue, we will explain the unexplained. And most important of all, we will (for the first time after more than 50 years) show the reader an organizational chart of the JFK assassination.
Ignorance is Bliss
This exhaustive research has satisfied a desire on the part of this author which began in 1963. It was then when the earthshaking news of the assassination was announced on a high school public address system. This desire was given impetus by the book Crossfire by Jim Marrs and also the Oliver Stone movie JFK which came out in 1992.
But what is the fundamental challenge in JFK assassination research? This fundamental problem is the primary reason which explains why the JFK assassination has never been adequately explained in any previously published book. This question has to be answered before research can go further. This question is, how much do we really want to know about who killed JFK? How much is our country ready to handle?
Many authors who have written about the JFK assassination have not been sincerely interested in solving the JFK mystery, although some have made outstanding contributions.
In my opinion, the best approach is to treat the JFK case as what it really is: a murder. To make a case against a murderer, one has to weigh all the facts and establish a theory of the case. There are written complaints and briefs which are created to support the theory of the case. Too many JFK authors have adopted an approach of “throwing in the kitchen sink.”
With the singular exception of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, no researcher, investigator or anyone else has had in his job description the assignment of finding out who murdered JFK. The mission statement of the Warren Commission was “to evaluate evidence presented to it by the FBI.” The task of the author of assassination books is, after all, to sell books. In defense of such outstanding authors such as Dr. Jeffrey Caulfield, Dick Russell and Michael Collins Piper, some have decided primarily to mine the information and generate as much evidence as possible for posterity. Despite reams of evidence, the JFK case has obviously never been solved either legally or in the minds of Americans.
In my opinion, patriotic Americans should consider it priority one to analyze and discover who murdered JFK and how. If the reader does not share this type of commitment or perspective, he should read no further.
This type of case can’t be put on the back of a lone “nut.” This case can’t be solved by only examining forensics. To understand this case, the reader must be willing to take as broad a perspective as necessary to reach understanding. If that requires familiarity with the price of beans in China, then so be it. If it requires a complete understanding of the politics in the U.S. from 1935 to 1963, then that’s just what it takes.
Every closed door must be opened. That means that reading one single sentence or one paragraph won’t suffice. For example, to decide on the guilt or innocence of Baron George de Mohrenschildt, his entire life story must be researched in some detail.
As in most classical murder cases, the JFK case could turn on one single strand of hair, or one single drop of blood. There would never be any murder trials at all if conviction required a mountain of probative evidence. In the famous case against star athlete O.J. Simpson for the murder of his wife, the case turned on the barking of a single dog. If the dog had barked only ten minutes earlier, Simpson would have been convicted. And this was after the presentation of months of evidence. But for the barking dog, none of it had been decisive.
Notes:
A key citation throughout this work relevant to Senator Thomas J. Dodd are the Senate hearings referenced as Investigation of Senator Thomas J. Dodd. : Hearings, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session ... pursuant to S. Res. 338, 88th Congress. PT. 1-2 by United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Standards and Conduct. Published 1966.
A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And the Case That Should Have Changed History (2007) by Joan Mellen see page 136.
The New Germany And The Old Nazis by Tete Harens (T.H.) Tetens (1961) at p. 203.
Target de Gaulle : the thirty-one attempts to assassinate the General by Christian Plume and Pierre Demaret (1974).
Chapter 2
The Organizational Chart of the de Gaulle Plot
With Background and Explanation
One of the best assassination books to start with is entitled Target de Gaulle: The True Story Of The 31 Attempts On The Life Of The French President by Christian Plume and Pierre Demaret. This book provides some unique information. As was mentioned in the prior chapter, an associate of Jim Garrison believed the same people who murdered JFK also tried three times (or maybe more) to kill de Gaulle.
At a fundamental level, the book by Plume and Demaret provides a very good model of what a plot to kill a president looks like. Of the 31 attempts claimed, there were actually only three that rise to the level of out-and-out serious attempts. One was called Pont-Sur-Seine, another Petit-Clamart and the last Ecole Militaire.
Most people assume that the assassination attempts on President Charles de Gaulle were the work of the French OAS. The French colony of Algeria was fiercely demanding independence in 1960. People in France who opposed Algerian independence lost faith in the French military to prevent this from happening. For this reason, a civilian organization was formed outside the French government called the organization de l’armée secrete, or OAS (a French acronym) which was made up of former military officers and personnel. A former French general named Raoul Salan was named as its leader. Salan had been commander of the French military in Algeria, but resigned in 1958 and moved to Spain.
In a bizarre episode, there was a meeting between General Salan and the top CIA official in France. In a letter dated December 12, 1961 which traveled all the way to the desk of President Kennedy, General Salan asked Kennedy to intervene in the war in Algeria. The pretext was to keep Algeria out of the hands of Communists. It is incredible that, following this request, the CIA agreed to arm 1 million men in Algeria for this purpose. When JFK found out about this, he countermanded this absurd CIA proposal.
According to Plume and Demaret, there were three groups which wished to “eliminate” de Gaulle.
1). The Old General Staff, inaccurately described as “of the Army.�
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2). The French Army itself which was, in fact, divided on the issue and
3). Supporters of French Algeria who were organizing completely in secret.
The following is important for the JFK reader to know. In January 1961, certain “mysterious” forces in France, drawn from the worlds of finance, politics, the Army, and the French government, had been at work undercover. On a certain date in 1961, these forces decided to start taking major risks. Per Plume and Demaret:
The group which made a special impact on 5th January was closely connected with world Catholicism; its composition alone is proof; most of them were ultra-nationalist Catholics. This group was known, somewhat misleadingly, as the “Old General Staff.” It was a group which was behind the two major assassination attempts at Pont-sur-Seine and Petit-Clamart. Both attempts were directed by Lieutenant-Colonel Bastien-Thiry; in conversation with his associates, he continually referred to certain mysterious superiors.
Various JFK researchers claim that the de Gaulle attacks were sponsored by the FBI, U.S. Military Intelligence or by NATO itself. Superficially, this would seem to be confirmed by the fact that, at some point after the several assassination attempts, de Gaulle ordered NATO troops off French soil. At the time, de Gaulle claimed that the presence of the NATO command center on French soil actually compromised French sovereignty. The line commanders of NATO at that time were, in turn, General Lauris Norstad and General Lyman Lemnitzer. Interestingly, in the LBJ phone calls during the week following the assassination, General Norstad was being forcefully promoted as a candidate to sit on the Warren Commission. Supposedly, according to some authors, French Intelligence traced the money for the de Gaulle assassination attempts back through the NATO headquarters. In this period, the NATO Secretary General, Dirk Stikker was a close personal friend of German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Further, the top ranking military person in NATO (who was the Permanent Chairman of the Military Committee), was General Adolf Heusinger who had been the right-hand man to Hitler on the Russian front.
