The problem with the other witnesses, all much more credible than Ms. Markham, was that they told of seeing two shooters, clearly not what the FBI wanted to hear. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover explicitly ordered the special agent in charge of the Dallas bureau office not to permit his agents to question Acquilla Clemons or Mr. and Mrs. Wright, a fact later revealed when the FBI memo from Hoover to Gordon Shanklin was noted in Michael Kurtz’s book, Crime of the Century.93
The other, even more compelling, exculpatory evidence that contradicted Oswald’s involvement in the Tippit shooting related to the inconsistencies with ballistics evidence. While the initial report radioed in by Patrolman H. W. Summers indicated the suspect (who was said to have “black wavy hair, wearing an Eisenhower jacket of light color, dark trousers, and a white shirt, none of which matched Oswald), had a different kind of handgun. Moments later Sergeant G. Hill reported that “the shell at the scene indicates that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 caliber, rather than a pistol.” It is sufficient to state that there is a major difference in an “automatic,” rather than a “pistol,” which was a term used to mean a “revolver.”94 Additionally, the Dallas coroner had removed four bullets from Tippit’s body and found that three were copper coated, manufactured by the Winchester Western company. The fourth was a lead bullet without a copper jacket, made by the Remington-Peters company. This evidence alone indicated that there were two different gunmen involved.95
The Dallas homicide unit sent only one bullet to the FBI lab, which initially found that the bullet did not match Oswald’s revolver. The commission eventually questioned why all four bullets were not processed and, months later, they were dug out of the files of the Dallas homicide division; the next evaluation was inconclusive as to whether they matched Oswald’s gun. Another discrepancy related to the cartridges was that Officer J. M Poe had scratched his initials into the two that he had obtained from witness Domingo Benavides, yet there were no such markings on any of the four, including additional markings which Sergeant W. E. Barnes had added to the two shells.96
The severe mishandling of the ballistic evidence and the carefully selected “witness” testimony proved conclusively the blatant manipulation of evidence by the Dallas homicide unit in the Tippet case: attempting to conceal three bullets, the disappearance of at least two, and likely all four, of the automatic cartridges found at the scene and the failure to aggressively pursue the testimony of the most credible witnesses who saw two assailants are all clear indications that the Dallas Police attempted to tie Oswald to the murder of Tippit and thus provide a linkage to the assassination of President Kennedy.
Telltale Signs of the Complicity of Key Military Officers
Author Twyman interviewed Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who had been stationed at the Pentagon through the early 1960s. Prouty told him that “the Pentagon was in shock and dismay when JFK was elected. He said that this happened from the very beginning, immediately after the election (not just after the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban missile crisis). He said that many, or most, military people in the Pentagon had contempt for Kennedy, but there were also people like himself who admired him.”97 Prouty also emphasized the disgust of many top-level military officers with specific actions taken by Kennedy and McNamara, directly referencing the TFX contract, saying that General Curtis LeMay was enraged when they took over and soon cancelled the decision to award the $6.5 billion contract to Boeing and awarded it to General Dynamics, though Johnson was actually to blame for the switch.
Colonel Prouty told Noel Twyman that Colonel Howard Burris, Johnson’s military aide, was one of the most important of the Pentagon men during that time, which would have given him a high level entrée into highly secret places along the Potomac other than the Pentagon.98 Prouty explained to Twyman that when the White House trumped the military chiefs by taking over the awarding of the TFX contract, it created a chasm between the career officers and McNamara, and further, to Kennedy, that “was a major item for consideration as to the motive in the assassination.”99 He went further, to suggest that there was someone else that Twyman had not mentioned, someone who might be a “hot item.” When Twyman then mentioned the “back channel” connection to the CIA’s Vietnam assessments—information that neither McNamara nor JFK even had access to—and read him a “TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY” July 20, 1961, memorandum written by Colonel Howard L. Burris, LBJ’s military aide, Prouty exclaimed, “There is the hot item”(emphasis added). Burris at that time was one of the most important of the Pentagon men.100 Prouty said that he and Burris had been friends and neighbors for a while, but that the last he knew of Burris was that he retired in 1964 and later became a wealthy oil man with operations in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries throughout the world. The circumstances of his retirement shortly after the assassination, followed by his stunningly quick success as a lobbyist and international businessman in the oil industry, make Colonel Burris one of the most enigmatic, yet least researched and little understood figures closest to Lyndon B. Johnson as of November 1963.
One of Colonel Burris’s early assignments, in May 1961, was to accompany Johnson on the trip to Vietnam. To prepare for that trip, he was rehearsed on how to control LBJ and told what he could say or could not say to the vice president. What he found suggests that he thought Johnson had a rather provincial and shallow understanding of the culture, economy, history, and concerns of Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular. As reported in a previous chapter, Colonel Burris said that “I don’t think he had a really deep perception and comprehension of what the whole scene was about.”101 This trip—despite Johnson’s miserable performance, as previously described—would mark the start of what would become Johnson’s secret back-channel to the CIA, which provided him unfiltered intelligence information unavailable to either McNamara or Kennedy. Author Gus Russo confirmed this when he stated that Burris had personally told him that “Johnson had back-channel sources at the CIA that kept him apprised of such matters.”102
Still another connection to the CIA was the discovery, by Russo, that the unlisted phone number of Howard Burris was found in George DeMohrenschildt’s address book.103 An explanation for this was discovered by researcher/author Larry Hancock, among records which indicated that Burris was reporting to the directorate of plans by 1963 while working on the TFX program (undoubtedly at the behest of Johnson). He was still a liaison to the vice president and had become embroiled in a prolonged feud with Johnson’s aide Walter Jenkins regarding actions Burris felt were essential to prepare the vice president to assume the presidency; one of his concerns was establishing his own position in the chain of command, including acquiring an office close to Johnson in the EOB rather than within the Pentagon. It was Jenkins who suggested to Burris that he meet with de Mohrenschildt, according to those same records104 though the purpose of that specific meeting is still unclear.
Colonel Burris went to Texas on November 21, 1963, as Johnson had directed him, though his statement about the reason for this is yet another puzzle, considering that Johnson and Kennedy never discussed issues of substantive foreign policy, especially on political trips unrelated to such subjects. He said, “I was to be there at that [Friday night] meeting. Johnson had asked me to prepare a briefcase full of ‘Eyes Only’ documents for the meeting.”105 According to author Russo, this material was to be used by Johnson in his planned confrontation with JFK on foreign policy issues, a subject which he had steadfastly ignored for most of the past three years. Furthermore, it has been well established that the big “welcome” party planned at the LBJ Ranch, with dozens of people in attendance, would have precluded any such meeting. The fact that there were so many questions raised by all of this suggests that it was merely another diversion, but it didn’t end there. Burris told author Russo of catching a flight back to Washington the next day on a two-seat fighter jet in which he had to seize the unfamiliar controls and take over flying and landing the jet after the pilot lost consciousness (his previous flying experi
ence was as the commander of [four engine] bomber units in England and France twenty years earlier).106 That story was told thirty-five years after the event, evidently for the first time; the fact that he submitted an expense report at the time for a return trip on a commercial airline from San Antonio, via Chicago, to Washington suggests that he was either playing games with Russo or simply lying about the entire episode for some reason, which will doubtlessly never be known now that he is deceased. One explanation for why Johnson wanted Burris at his ranch with top secret reports concerning Cuba and the Soviet Union might have been related to the possible need for a Cuban invasion in case the “lone nut” option could not be used.
Colonel Howard L. Burris seems to have done very well for himself when he retired shortly after the assassination. Even before his retirement, within a month of the assassination, he took a long-term leave and travelled to Germany and Austria. His thirty-year career is interesting in many respects, not the least being his rapid promotions—from second lieutenant to colonel—in the first three years, but no further promotions for the next twenty-seven years; it is an understatement to say that this was “unusual,” unless possibly this was only a “cover” that helped to insinuate him into multiple international circles. He began working as a consultant/lobbyist for Martin Marietta and McDonnell-Douglas shortly afterward and continued to keep in close contact with the new president Johnson and his aides—one in particular, Cliff Carter—for the rest of Johnson’s term. There were no indications of great wealth in Burris’s past, yet somehow, working apparently part-time as a lobbyist, he managed to acquire such affluence that he was able to build a palatial estate on 149 acres overlooking the Potomac River, which he called Heritage Gardens, estimated to have cost $15 million in 1968. During this interim period, Burris had become very close to Richard Helms, and both of them became very close friends with the shah of Iran. In fact, his son, Howard Lay Burris Jr., was married for a while to Princess Shahrazad Pahlbod, the niece of the late shah of Iran—which reflects the closeness of his father’s relationship with the CIA director who had been a longtime friend of the late Shah.107
There were a number of other very visible peripheral ties relating to the involvement of key, high-level military officers in JFK’s assassination in Dallas, including the following:108
• General Charles P. Cabell, the brother of Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell, after being fired by Kennedy as deputy director of the CIA, he called Kennedy a traitor. This was not simply excusable hyperbole from an armchair philosopher, coming from a general in the U.S. Army, it is incendiary and unprofessional conduct and should be taken as seriously as the literal context of the remark. But then, he was not alone in that, General LeMay, [and Generals Power and Willoughby all] had a habit of doing the same thing.
• An army intelligence officer accompanied Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack Revill on a ride to the Dallas Police Station and was evidently his source for an incorrect address for Lee Harvey Oswald, “605 Elsbeth.” Oswald had lived at “602 Elsbeth” the previous year, but the only file which had contained the incorrect address was later determined to have been in the filing cabinet of the 112th MI group, located in Dallas.
• Immediately after JFK’s body was taken by Secret Service agents out of Parkland Hospital, the military assumed custody of it and remained in control of it through the transport by air and ambulance/hearse to military hospital(s) for autopsy, funeral, and burial. A team of high-level military officers were on hand to monitor the entire procedure and in fact, controlled the military doctors performing it, as we will examine below, ordering them to refrain from normal procedures used in the most routine homicide investigations.109 Any tampering with Kennedy’s body, regardless of when and where it might have been, could have only been accomplished with the acquiescence of these high-level military brass—under their direct orders to do so, in fact, as will become apparent below. Additionally, to be seen shortly, a very complex “shell game” involving the ornate casket in which JFK’s body had left Parkland Hospital would play out between the time it left there and when it arrived back at Bethesda in that same coffin. The logistical moves related to this—confirmed by numerous enlisted men who had been sworn to secrecy and who abided by this for many years—could only have been accomplished by very high-level military officers.
CIA Presence in Dealey Plaza
Colonel Prouty also advised author Twyman that Edward Lansdale had been sent to Dallas where his picture was taken in Dealey Plaza (walking beside and in the opposite direction of the “tramps” and two “policemen” carrying shotguns, not rifles—which they were doing very casually and unprofessionally—in one widely viewed photograph). Prouty sent this and other photos to Gen. Victor Krulak, who also knew Lansdale very well; he confirmed Prouty’s assertion. “That is indeed a picture of Ed Lansdale. The haircut, the stoop, the twisted left hand, the large class ring. It’s Lansdale. What in the world was he doing there?”110 The purpose of such a trip, assuming that he had no role in the assassination, was not clear at the time; but that was over thirty-five years ago, and the fog has lifted sufficiently now to allow the implications to become apparent: Edward Lansdale’s role appears to have been that of a “field commander.”
His high-level intelligence and military connections were described in chapter 3, and Lansdale’s long history of creating complex manipulative schemes affecting many thousands of indigenous people in far-off lands earned him the nickname, “the Ugly American.” Edward Lansdale was probably the single most experienced man in America in planning the most cunning and deadly covert military operations of the era, from the Philippines, to Vietnam, and finally, Cuba.111 When JFK refused to appoint him to be the ambassador to Vietnam in 1961, a position which he coveted and practically assumed he would be given, he was furious. Eventually, he was put in charge of Operation Mongoose, a position at the center of a cauldron filled to the brim with CIA operatives and anti-Castro Cubans, all of whom hated JFK. In that capacity, he would direct—or participate in—the activities of such men as William K. (Bill) Harvey, George Joannides, David Atlee Phillips, and David Sanchez Morales, among others.
But Edward Lansdale was not the only CIA man in Dealey Plaza that day.* Other photos show a half dozen or more CIA officials, including Lucien Conein, Grayston Lynch, Ted Shackley, Tracy Barnes, and William “Rip” Robertson (in the Altgens 4 photo) and E. Howard Hunt were also present (in the Rickerby photo; his son, Saint John Hunt told this author that he agrees that the man in a three-quarter-length trench coat crossing Elm Street shortly after the assassination with many others “does resemble his overall appearance,” although he hasn’t conclusively determined that it was him). All of this begs the question: What were so many spooks doing in Dealey Plaza that day? Even Joseph Milteer, the right-wing reactionary caught on tape discussing the planned assassination in Miami the week before (previously noted), was photographed in Dealey Plaza. Chauncey Marvin Holt, who appears to have been the third tramp and who prepared fifteen sets of forged Secret Service IDs for use in and around the plaza, told James Fetzer that he had seen “more mercenaries and assassins in Dealey Plaza [before JFK was taken out] than you would at a Soldiers of Fortune convention”. The most likely explanation, as Chauncey told Fetzer, was to create a load of “red herrings” if an investigation were to pursue those who were there.112 The CIA officials, by contrast, were probably there to pay their last respects to a man whose death they had helped to plan. The killing of a president, after all, was a historic event, which they wanted to witness. These inferences regarding the motives of so many men, though somewhat speculative, are also reasonable presumptions in light of the many indications of CIA collaboration presented throughout this synopsis.
Confusion at Bethesda Naval Hospital
When Air Force One arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, the coffin was quickly unloaded and placed in a gray Pontiac navy ambulance to convey it, with Jacqueline and Bobby Kennedy, to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. A helicopte
r departed the area shortly thereafter even though it was never officially acknowledged as having any role in the operation—although the use of helicopters to convey the coffin to Walter Reed Hospital had been discussed by military officers in Washington with others on board Air Force One as it flew back from Dallas. In a memo dated October 17, 1995, former AARB investigator Doug Horne (now researcher/author, as previously noted) wrote Jeremy Gunn, the gèneral counsel for the AARB, summarizing his findings from a review of the recordings; excerpts of that memo follow:113
• Onboard Air Force One on the return flight to Washington, Secret Service Agent Kellerman, and later General Ted Clifton (Military Aide to the President) make it clear that their desire is for an ambulance and limousine to take President Kennedy’s body to Walter Reed General Hospital for autopsy “under guard … ,” as specified by General Clifton. Gerald Behn, Head of the White House Secret Service Detail, counters that a helicopter has been arranged to take the president’s body to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda for autopsy, and that all other personnel will be choppered to the South Grounds of the White House.
• Ultimately, the president’s physician, Admiral George Burkley (on Air Force One), sides with Gerald Behn (at the White House) in support of a Bethesda autopsy and persuades the Surgeon General of the Army, General Heaton (in Washington) to cancel arrangements for a Walter Reed autopsy.
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