Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Photoanalysis by Jack White

  DEAR MR. HUNT—This handwritten note, dated November 8, 1963, and signed “Lee Harvey Oswald,” is addressed to a “Mr. Hunt,” requesting “information concerding [sic] my position.” The handwriting has been authenticated as that of Oswald. Some researchers believe the note was meant for Dallas oilman H. L. Hunt, who was open about his hatred of Kennedy. However, the fact that the note originated in Mexico City has lead other researchers to suspect the addressee may have been Watergate scandal figure E. Howard Hunt, a CIA officer working with anti-Castro Cubans in 1963. By some accounts, Hunt was in Mexico City at the time the note was written and some, including his son, St. John Hunt, have placed him in photographs taken in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. In a dying declaration, the elder Hunt named the chief assassination conspirators as Lyndon Johnson, Cord Meyer and William Harvey of the CIA, operative David Morales, and a French assassin.

  UNDERCOVER WORK—Tantalizing evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald participated in intelligence work is reflected in this Marine medical record dated September 16, 1958. Every branch of the US military cautions troops against contracting venereal disease. Some units, such as the Marine Corps, punish members who are treated for such disease. Yet, Oswald’s military record indicates that his case of gonorrhea was contracted “In line of duty, Not due to own misconduct.” This astonishing statement indicates that Marine Oswald may have been recruited into intelligence work while serving in Japan and ordered to consort with prostitutes suspected as foreign agents.

  PART III

  AFTERMATH

  Dallas

  The gunfire had barely died away in Dealey Plaza when an aftermath of odd and often unexplained events began in Dallas—and has continued for decades, a circumstance well beyond the means of any lone assassin.

  Dallas police blocking the nearby intersections with no orders to the contrary—recall the eight-minute disruption of the Dallas police radio motorcade channel during the time of the shooting—released traffic, which began pouring through the crime scene.

  Spectators from blocks away, having heard the shots and sirens, ran to the scene. Some bystanders were in shock. Others were shouting, “They shot the president!” while others sobbed out the news. Pandemonium was the order of the day.

  There was no shortage of lawmen as nearly twenty sheriff’s deputies, following sheriff Bill Decker’s orders, ran to the railroad yards behind the Grassy Knoll. Dozens of Dallas police officers also were flooding the area. But all were receiving conflicting information—witnesses on the west end of Dealey Plaza pinpointed the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll as the source of the shots, while many people on the east end said shots came from the vicinity of the Texas School Book Depository.

  It is significant to recall that James Tague, who was slightly wounded when a bullet or bullet fragment struck the Main Street curb near the Triple Underpass, last spoke with deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers before having to move his car once traffic got moving. Tague said this occurred about 12:40 p.m.

  Yet Walthers was among the first officers to seal off the Depository, indicating that the building was still open for at least ten minutes after the shooting.

  Actually the time may have been much longer. Captain Will Fritz, who headed the Dallas police investigation, told the Warren Commission he began making detailed notes after hearing of the assassination at the Trade Mart. Fritz said he arrived at the Texas School Book Depository at exactly 12:58 p.m. Asked if the Depository exits were guarded at that time, Fritz replied, “I am not sure, but I don’t—there had been some question about that, but the reason I don’t think that—this may differ with someone else, but I am going to tell you what I know. . . . After I arrived, one of the officers asked me if I would like to have the building sealed and I told him I would.”

  Recall that witness Ed Hoffman was able to drive from Stemmons Freeway to the railroad yards behind the Depository, circle the area, and leave unchallenged.

  The point is that there was no effective containment of the crime scene or of the Depository for at least ten minutes—and perhaps as much as twenty-eight minutes—after the shooting.

  Officially it has been claimed that within an hour of the assassination, there was a roll call at the Texas School Book Depository. Employee Lee Harvey Oswald was the only person missing and authorities immediately began a search for him. Like so much other information in this case, this story is simply untrue.

  To begin with, most Depository employees were outside viewing the motorcade at the time of the shooting and were prevented from returning to work by police. During the first roll call, dozens of Depository employees were missing. By the time it was determined that Oswald was gone—about 2:30 p.m.—he was already in police custody.

  This was confirmed in 1981 by Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Biffle, who recalled that day in a lengthy article based on his notes of that day:

  Only two of us [reporters] had arrived at the ambush building [the Depository] by this point. . . . Getting in was no problem. I just hid my press badge . . . and went in with the first wave of cops. . . . Hours dragged by. The building superintendent showed up with some papers in his hand. I listened as he told detectives about Lee Oswald failing to show up at a roll call. My impression is that there was an earlier roll call that had been inconclusive because several employees were missing. This time, however, all were accounted for except Oswald. I jotted down the Oswald information. . . . Neither the police in the building nor the superintendent knew that Oswald already was under arrest.

  In the confusion following the assassination, there was ample opportunity for conspirators to escape and for vital evidence to be eliminated.

  One such incident occurred minutes after the shooting on the south side of Elm Street. Dallas policeman J. W. Foster, from his vantage point on top of the Triple Underpass, saw a bullet strike the grass on the south side of Elm near a manhole cover. He reported this to a superior officer and was told to guard the area. Photographs taken that day show both Foster and Deputy Sheriff Walthers standing over the manhole cover.

  News reporters and spectators were kept at a distance and told that evidence—a bullet—was embedded in the grass inches from the manhole cover. News cameraman Harry Cabluck photographed the scene and recalled seeing more than one gouge in the ground. He, too, was told that a bullet had struck there. One photograph of the slug even appeared in the November 23, 1963, edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, with the caption:

  ASSASSIN’S BULLET: One of the rifle bullets fired by the murderer of President Kennedy lies in the grass across Elm Street from the building in which the killer was hiding and from where he launched his assault.

  Inches from the bullet, which is circled in the newspaper photo, is the edge of the cement manhole.

  Other witnesses to the bullet marks on the south side of Elm Street were Wayne and Edna Hartman, who were in Dallas for jury duty. After hearing shots in Dealey Plaza, the couple “ran like the devil” down to the grassy middle area of the plaza. Mrs. Hartman told this author:

  There were not many people in this area at the time, but a policeman was there. He pointed to some bushes near the railroad tracks on the north side of the street and said that’s where the shots came from. . . . Then I noticed these two parallel marks on the ground that looked like mounds made by a mole. I asked “What are these, mole hills?” and the policeman said, “Oh no, ma’am, that’s where the bullets struck the ground.”

  On Sunday, the Hartmans again visited Dealey Plaza but found that the crush of people bringing memorials had obliterated the marks.

  In the summer of 1964, the Hartmans contacted the FBI after learning that the bureau was still seeking assassination information. Mrs. Hartman said FBI agents didn’t seem too interested in what they had to say. One agent told them the marks had been made by bone fragments from Kennedy’s head, an explanation that sounded “strange” to the Hartmans.

  Both Hartmans told the FBI that t
he bullet marks did not line up with the Texas School Book Depository but rather with the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll. Years later, Mrs. Hartman recalled:

  I don’t see how what we saw down there could have come from those windows up there because they were not the right angle. So we have always felt that it came from across the street . . . that was the angle . . . across the street from where we stood . . . the Grassy Knoll, we’ve always felt it came from there. . . . And at that time people were telling us the bullets came from over there. There was somebody over there shooting also. And they pointed across the street, which was south of the Depository.

  Yet in an FBI report dated July 10, 1964, agents stated, “[The Hartmans] said this gouged out hole was in line with the general area of the Texas School Book Depository Building. [They] said some bystander had mentioned that he believed the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository Building.”

  If one or more bullet slugs were in the grass, what happened to them? What role did an extra slug play in the assassination? Was the erroneous FBI report a mistake or was it meant to pinpoint the Depository as the assassin’s lair? Was the slug in the grass proof that at least four shots were fired? The answers to these questions may never be known because, officially, this bullet never existed.

  Within minutes of the shooting, a sandy-haired man in a suit appeared—identified in Dallas police chief Jesse Curry’s book as an FBI agent. This man apparently had some authority, for in full view of both Walthers and Foster, he walked up, reached down, cupped some object in his hand, and stuck it into his left pants pocket.

  The bullet was gone.

  Later in 1964, when reports of this bullet reached the Warren Commission, the FBI was instructed to investigate the matter. Agents reported back that they had examined the manhole cover and there was no sign of a bullet striking it. There was no mention of the fact that the bullet in question landed inches away from the manhole cover. Apparently satisfied, the Commission dropped the matter of the bullet in the grass.

  Later on the day of the assassination, the Stemmons Freeway sign, which according to some bystanders was struck by a bullet, disappeared. It is missing in photographs made in Dealey Plaza the next day. No official explanation of this disappearance has been offered, although some Dallasites recalled a brief local news segment at the time explaining that the sign was taken down by the city because a bullet hole in it would remind the public of the assassination.

  In 2004 the Asahi Television Network of Japan procured two separate copies of the Zapruder film, both of which contained approximately six frames missing from the copies shown around the world to the public. Life magazine officials explained the missing frames were due to processing damage. In the missing frames it is apparent that a small hole appears in the Stemmons sign at the time of the shooting. Computer experts in England and Poland confirmed this as a bullet hole.

  In 1974, Richard Lester, using a metal detector, discovered a bullet fragment on the far south side of Dealey Plaza just east of the Triple Underpass. Two years later, Lester turned the fragment over to the FBI. It was later studied by firearms experts of the House Select Committee on Assassinations who determined through ballistics that while the fragment was from 6.5-millimeter ammunition, it had not been fired through the Oswald rifle. Rather than view this as evidence that perhaps multiple rifles were used in the assassination, both the FBI and the committee left the impression that this discovery had no connection with Kennedy’s death.

  An intact .45-caliber bullet was discovered in May 1976 by Hal Luster buried in dirt by the four-foot-high cement retaining wall near where Abraham Zapruder had stood filming.

  Yet another story of a found shell casing may shed much light on how some bullet fragments were traced to the Oswald rifle.

  Dean Morgan of Lewisville, a suburb of Dallas, related that in 1975 his father was working on air-conditioning equipment on the roof of the Dallas County Records Building, located just catercornered from the Texas School Book Depository. The Records Building’s west side faces onto Dealey Plaza and there is a waist-high parapet along the edge of its roof.

  According to Morgan, his father, while searching for water leaks, discovered a 30.06-caliber shell casing lying under a lip of roofing tar at the base of the roof’s parapet on the side facing Dealey Plaza.

  The shell casing is dated 1953 and marks indicate it was manufactured at the Twin Cities Arsenal. One side was pitted by exposure to the weather, indicating it had lain on the roof for a long time. The casing, which remains in Morgan’s possession, has an odd crimp around its neck.

  Rifle experts have explained to Morgan that this is evidence that a sabot may have been used to fire ammunition from a 30.06 rifle. A sabot, also called a husk, is a plastic sleeve that allows a larger-caliber weapon to fire a smaller-caliber slug. The results of using a lighter-weight slug include increased velocity, producing more accuracy and greater striking power. And the smaller slug exhibits the ballistics of the weapon it was originally fired from, rather than, in this case, the 30.06, as the sabot engages the 30.06’s rifling.

  In other words, assassination conspirators could have fired 6.5-millimeter bullets from the Oswald rifle into water, recovered them, then reloaded them into the more accurate and powerful 30.06 with the use of a sabot—which is held in place by crimping the cartridge.

  By this method, bullet fragments found in the presidential limousine would have the ballistics of Oswald’s rifle rather than the 30.06 from which they were actually fired.

  Warren Commission Exhibit 399—the nearly intact slug found at Parkland Hospital the afternoon of the assassination—displays all the characteristics of a slug fired into nothing more solid than water. It is just such a slug that can be reloaded and refired using a sabot, which comes apart on firing.

  That such technology was available in 1963 is proven by a February 1962 ad in Guns magazine offering “Husk Bullets,” and depicting a .22-caliber slug seated in a .308-caliber shell casing.

  One such plastic sabot reportedly was found in Dealey Plaza the afternoon of the assassination by a member of the anticommunist Minutemen organization, led by Missouri biochemist Robert DePugh, who related the story to talk-show host Stan Major in the early 1990s. He claimed that a few months after he received the sabot, the FBI raided his home and took all his possessions. Eventually it was all returned, except for the plastic sleeve. DePugh died in 2009.

  Bullets and a plastic sleeve were not the only evidence found in Dealey Plaza.

  The day after the assassination, a college student named Billy Harper was taking pictures in the plaza when he found a piece of skull about twenty-five feet behind and to the left of the president’s limo at the time of the head shot. Personnel at Methodist Hospital identified it as a piece from the occipital region at the right rear of the head. It, too, was never acknowledged by the Warren Commission.

  And while evidence was disappearing from Elm Street, men were seen fleeing the rear of the Texas School Book Depository.

  Richard Carr, a steelworker who saw a heavyset man on the sixth floor of the Depository minutes before the shooting, saw two men run either from inside or from behind the Texas School Book Depository minutes after the assassination.

  Carr claimed the men got into a Nash Rambler station wagon on Houston Street by the east side of the Depository. He said the wagon left in such a hurry one of its doors was still open. He last saw the station wagon speeding north on Houston. Did it return moments later to pick up the Oswald figure as reported by Deputy Sheriff Craig?

  After reaching ground level from his seventh-story vantage point on the courthouse under construction, Carr said he saw the same man he had seen earlier in the Depository window. Carr said the man was “in an extreme hurry and kept looking over his shoulder” as he walked hurriedly eastward on Commerce Street.

  Carr’s story was corroborated by that of James R. Worrell Jr., then a twenty-year-old high school senior who told the Warren Commission that seconds af
ter the shooting, he saw a man wearing a sports coat come out of the rear of the Depository and walk briskly south on Houston (the direction of Carr’s location). Worrell can’t be questioned further about what he saw, as he was killed in a motorcycle accident on November 9, 1966, at age twenty-three. Carr, however, told researchers about his treatment at the hands of the authorities. In a taped interview, Carr said:

  The FBI came to my house—there were two of them—and they said they heard I witnessed the assassination and I said I did. They told me, “If you didn’t see Lee Harvey Oswald up in the School Book Depository with a rifle, you didn’t witness it.” I said, “Well, the man I saw on television that they tell me is Lee Harvey Oswald was not in the window of the School Book Depository. That’s not the man.” And [one of the agents] said I better keep my mouth shut. He did not ask me what I saw, he told me what I saw.