JFK, the CIA and The New York Times

“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” — William Colby, former CIA Director

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, who would subsequently co-author All the President’s Men (1994)  with Bob Woodward, one of the most celebrated books in American political history, published “The CIA and the Media”, Rolling Stone (October 20, 1977), reporting that, with respect to its infiltration of the American media, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” Those who lent their cooperation to the agency were  Williarn Paley of the CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA included ABC, NBC, the AP, the UPI, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.  It was therefore fascinating to discover that The New York Times,which has a history of suppressing research on the assassination of JFK, was publishing “The Umbrella Man: A video interview with the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (1967)”, widely regarded as a classic of conspiracy research on the assassination of JFK.

Its author, Josiah Thompson (whose nickname is “Tink”), was at one time a professor of philosophy at Haverford College and, when I returned from 13 months in the Far East with the 1st Battalion, 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, where we had been anchored out in Kauschung Harbor in Formosa (now Taichung Harbor, Taiwan), where I had been awakened at 3:30 AM by the officer of the deck who told me that JFK had been shot and, then again, an hour later that they had caught the guy who had done it, who was a communist, which I thought at the time was “pretty fast work”, I obtained a copy of his book while stationed at the USMC Recruit Depot in San Diego as a series commander, supervising 15 DIs and 300 recruits going through the training cycle, which I read with great interest, especially because I had earned my A.B. at Princeton in philosophy and, like myself, Tink had served in the Navy (in the UDT rather than the Marine Corps) and was doing research on JFK, which was attracting my interest as well.

At the time, I thought it was an admirable study, which payed special attention to the Zapruder film, to which the author had had access in conducting research with LIFEmagazine, ostensibly for an article about the film.  Apparently, Tink took a copy of the film without authorization and there was a falling out.  LIFE rescinded permission it had granted for him to use frames from the film, which were replaced by very high-quality charcoal sketches–not as good as the actual frames, but still valuable.  Among the most important features of his book was an analysis of the “double-hit”, according to which, in frame 312, JFK’s head moves forward under the impact of a shot fired from behind, while in frames 313-316, his head moves violently back and to the left, which is indicative of a shot fired from in front–to the right/front, actually, which many have assumed to have meant from the grassy knoll or even the picket fence. The book created quite a sensation at the time and lead to Thompson’s story being feature on the front page of The Saturday Evening Post (2 December 1967).

According to the analysis published there, three assassins had fired four shots, all of which hit.  The first, fired from the Texas School Book Depository, hit JFK in the back. The second, fired from the roof of the County Records Building, hit Gov. John Connally in the back.  The third, again from the Book Depository, hit JFK in the back of the head, moving it forward, while the fourth was fired from the picket fence and struck him in the right forehead, killing him.  For its time, this was excellent work, which offered a stunning contrast to the “official account” of the assassination, which featured three shots with one miss, where one hit JFK at the base of the back of his neck, passed through without hitting any bony structures, and entered John Connally’s back, while the other hit him in the back of the head, killing him.  We know today that the “magic bullet” scenario is not only provably false but not even anatomically possible, where no bullet could have taken the alleged trajectory, because cervical vertebrae intervene.  I even presented a lecture about it at Cambridge during an international conference, which would be published in an international, peer-reviewed journal under the title,“Reasoning about Assassinations”.

While Tink’s book was very good for its time, his analysis of the shot sequence was superseded by  the far more extensive study by Richard Sprague, COMPUTERS AND AUTOMATION (May 1970), which demonstrated that there had been more shooters and more shots, which I have refined based upon our studies of the medical evidence and the ballistics published in three books, Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003).  The issue over which we have repeatedly clashed, however, concerns the authenticity of the film that was the foundation for his book.  I suppose it would be only natural that he would resist evidence that the film has been faked (edited, altered, revised, fabricated), when it pulls the rug out from under his classic study.  The proof is abundant and compelling, as anyone who has followed my columns about JFK here can verify for themselves by reading “JFK: Who’s telling the truth:  Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?”, right here at Veterans Today.  If you read the comments on Six Seconds in Dallas (1967), moreover, you will find those who are adamant that Tink got it right and the rest of us got it wrong.  The first “reader’s review”, for example, makes these claims:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book ever about the Kennedy assassination – bar none, January 22, 2005

By Michael K. Beusch (San Mateo, California United States) – See all my reviews

Indeed, Josiah has been attacking me for doing research on Zapruder film authenticity since 1996, when I organized the first symposium devoted to this issue at the JFK Lancer Conference.  I conducted a 10.5 hour preliminary discussion the day before with a dozen or more students of the film, which led to the 4.5 hour presentation the following day with the best half-dozen, including Jack White, Noel Twyman, David Lifton, David Mantik and Chuck Marler, which can be obtained as a 2-disc DVD from Lancer to this day. Our encounters have been relentless since then, numbering in the hundreds.  By now, there may have been as many as a thousand, where he has referred to my first book as “Assassinated Science”, even though it published the studies of the autopsy X-rays by David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., which revealed that the X-rays had been altered to conceal the true causes of death of JFK, and by Robert Livingston, M.D., a world authority on the human brain and an expert on wound ballistics, who concluded that, given the consistent and multiple reports from experienced and highly qualified Parkland physicians, who described cerebellar as well as cerebral tissue extruding from fist-sized wound at the back of his head, that the brain shown in the diagrams and photographs at the National Archives could not possibly be of the brain of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Since it also included multiple studies of Zapruder film alteration, perhaps that was Tink’s overriding concern.

His credibility was not enhanced when he attacked Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), which many regard as the best published on the death of JFK, claiming that a study by Gary Aguilar, M.D., showing the consistency of descriptions of that fist-sized blow out to the back of the head had been highly consistent across witnesses in Dealey Plaza, others at Parkland Hospital, and even those who observed the body at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy would be performed.  While we now know that James Humes, who was performing the autopsy, actually took a cranial saw to the head and enlarged the head wound to make it look more like the effect of a shot fired from behind (but inexplicably allowed two witnesses to watch him do this, as Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB (2009), has documented in detail, which means that Aguilar’s study is not quite as accurate as I initially supposed), the case for that massive defect–or one that was even larger–is amply established by this study.  When Tink said that Gary’s chapter was the only good one in the book, therefore, I knew he had committed a blunder, since if Gary was right, then the film–which does not show this defect–had to have been faked.  Indeed, since I had found a late frame, 374, in which the blow out is visible, while it has been blacked out in frames 313-317, for example, the film is not even self-consistent, which means that it cannot, in its totality, possibly be authentic.

When I discovered that the estimable Errol Morris, described as “an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (‘The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara’) and a recent New York Times best-selling author (‘Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography’), whose first film, ‘Gates of Heaven’, is even on Roger Ebert’s list of the 10 best movies ever made, and his latest, ‘Tabloid’, has just been released on DVD”, was conducting a series of interviews with Tink, I was fairly incredulous.  It was striking to me that he had used “Believing as Seeing” as the title of his study about photography, since we had shown that “Seeing is not Believing” in relation to the Zapruder film.  In agreement with most students of JFK, I had formed the opinion that the Umbrella man was complicit in the assassination, not only because of his association with the Cuban, but because he had been pumping his umbrella up and down in what we took to be a signal to the assassins that their target was still alive and to continue shooting. The video interview in The New York Times, however, portrayed the Umbrella man as having been completely innocent and present with an umbrella to protest policies, not of JFK, but of his father in relation to an earlier era:

OP-DOCS

‘The Umbrella Man’: A video interview with the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (1967)

where this reader’s comment (and there were more than 250 at that point in time) spoke volumes to me about Tink’s interview and the impression it was conveying to the public:

I  submitted a comment of my own after listening to what Tink had to say, which was a fascinating effort to undermine not just conspiracy research related to the Umbrella man but, it turned out, with respect to JFK conspiracy research generally. With The Times running performance art like this from Josiah, I regarded it as most unlikely that they would publish my comment, even though I was exposing a false assumption at the foundation of his presentation:

Your Submitted Comment

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At this point, I was rather incensed that Tink was playing fast and loose with one of the most interesting figures whose image was recorded in the Zapruder film and by others with cameras in Dealey Plaza at the time.  I therefore initiated a thread on The Education Forum to discuss it, entitled “Tink’s performance in The New York Times: Josiah Thompson shows his true colors”. Among my earliest posts was one laying out arguments that Tink had shaded the evidence in a number of important respects, where I would later add photographs to support my points. When David S. Lifton, the author of Best Evidence (1980), asked for “credible evidence” that Witt was not the person he claimed to be to the HSCA, I posted three images that supported my objections to their identification:

(1)  As I have previously observed, the Umbrella Man and the Cuban were obviously together, where any explanation of the presence of the Umbrella Man must account for their association:

(2) While everyone else in Dealey Plaza was dumbfounded, the Umbrella man and the Cuban did not act surprised by the assassination–and their faces have been obscured in certain photos, which is highly suspicious by itself:

(3) Moreover, they hang around together, sitting on the curb, as though nothing especially unusual had taken place, where I had supposed virtually everyone would agree that their behavior is abnormal under these circumstances:

When Jim DiEugenio, the author of Destiny Betrayed (1992), posted this summary of Witt’s testimony, I thought the case against Witt was cinched:

At this point in time, I felt very confident that Jim and I were right in debunking Tink’s suggestion that the Umbrella man was Louie Steven Witt, including that Tink was taking that identification for granted, when it is instead a conclusion that requires its own substantiation. In logic, this is called “begging the question” by assuming what requires independent proof.  He was ignoring that more reasonable identifications would be of the Cuban as Felipe Vidal Santiago, a committed anti-Castro Cuban, and of Roy Hargraves, who fit the photos and the scenario, I thought, to a “t”. The very idea that Witt would offer this fantastic story about Joe Kennedy, which is preposterous on its face, and Tink would claim it was “so extraordinary and unbelievable it must be true”, struck me as simply absurd.

It seemed far more likely that, by pumping his umbrella, Witt was signaling to the assassins that JFK was still alive, which makes sense, rather than an obscure historical allusion that no one, including Jack, would have grasped.  By remarking that there are always alternative explanations that might be true, when you isolate one element of a complex picture, Tink was employing the technique known as “divide and conquer”. If all you knew were what Tink had presented in this little clip, then you could rather easily be taken in; but once you consider the other evidence we have available, his scenario is not remotely plausible.  Still, I thought it would be appropriate to review what others have thought, so I turned to Jim Marrs’ classic study, Crossfire (1989), pp. 29-32, for such light as it might shed on the subject.

No one could have been more surprised than I when another student of the assassination, Bernice Moore, sent me a comment that had been posted in response to The New York Times, which included an extract of Witt’s actual testimony to the HSCA:

This new evidence, moreover, makes an enormous difference to the evaluation of Witt’s testimony.  Based upon other evidence we have accumulated about the Zapruder film, which is contradicted by witness reports about the limo having been brought to a halt–which we believe was in response to the Cuban’s raised fist–for which there are many witnesses, whose reports have been collated by John Costella in “What happened on Elm Street? The Eyewitnesses Speak”,“New Proof of Zapruder Film Fakery” and “Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?”, what Witt is saying closely corresponds to those other witnesses and to the reports of others who have seen “the other film”, which appears to be the original Zapruder before it was subjected to reconstuction, as Doug Horne has explained in his five-volume study, which I summarized in “US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication”. As I then explained in post #160 on The Education Forum,

Well, I’m only beginning to sort this out, but his description of what happened is very close to what happened as we have reconstructed it. The limo stop, of course, is at the heart of the matter. It was such a blatant example of Secret Service complicity that it had to be taken out. When you study Clint Hill’s report of the sequence of acts he took–running forward, boarding the vehicle, pushing Jackie down, lying over their bodies and peering into a fist-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head while giving a “thumbs down” BEFORE THE LIMO REACHED the TUP–which he has been saying and reporting consistently for (then) 47 years–this is hardly the first time we’ve had a witness who supported the limo stop. I have given several references to studies that document their reports.

The point is that THIS DESCRIPTION, which was NOT in DiEugenio’s summary, POWERFULLY SUGGESTS HE ACTUALLY WAS THERE. Some of it is rather fascinating, including about the breaks and all that, because it has not come up before. But when you have a motorcade that is proceeding quite uneventually AND THE LEAD CAR SLAMS ON ITS BREAKS, it would not be surprising if the car following should run up against it or if other drivers had to react by slamming on their breaks. So you are making too quick an inferences from the sound of breaks to assuming the sound came from the limo! What he is saying needs to be sorted out but, given this stunning and dramatic report (which he cannot have acquired from viewing the Zapruder film), he probably WAS there.

It’s like finding a fingerprint or the DNA of someone who was not previously a suspect at a crime scene. This guy could not possibly have known some of what he is reporting UNLESS HE HAD BEEN THERE. Even the limo stop is not widely known, even though there are dozens and dozens of witnesses who reported it. Too many play on the “slowed dramatically” versus “came to a halt” difference, which is splitting hairs, since (1) it had to slow dramatically to come to a halt and (2) the Zapruder film shows NEITHER dramatic slowing NOR coming to a halt. So this is really quite remarkable, because, as in the case of Gary Aguilar’s chapter in MURDER, Tink has endorsed Witt, but he turns out to have witnessed the limo stop, which is further proof that the film is a fake.

I have now done what I should have done originally, namely, check his testimony for myself.  Here is what I have found:

While there is massive evidence of the limo stop (links to some of which I have cited above), I do not find Witt credible simply because he observed the limo stop but because he is reporting information that only someone who was actually there could possibly have known. The Zapruder film was shown for the first time on the Geraldo Rivera TV program in 1975, but it does not show any of these very specific details that Witt is reporting.  Even most  students of the assassination would be hard pressed to say what they think actually happened at that place and time. The screeching of tires, with one car running up onto the other (the Secret Service Cadillac evidently butting up against the Lincoln limousine) and one man jumping off and climbing onto the back of the other (Clint Hill rushing from the Cadillac to the back steps of the Lincoln) not only fits the scenario to a “t” but adds details that offer more data to consider, including especially the acoustical aspects of this event, which have been under-explored previous to this belated discovery.

This also means that Robert Morrow, another contributor to the forum, may have been closer to the truth than I was in relation to the Umbrella Man. A fundamental principle of scientific reasoning is that the search for truth must be based upon all the available relevant evidence. Witt’s remarks about the shots and their sound are also telling. We know many said that the first shot (or “the first shots”) sounded like firecrackers. Jim Lewis has found that, when high velocity bullets are fired through windshields, they make the sound of a firecracker. But the fact is we have new evidence to consider in assessing this. When his testimony was vague and ambiguous, my other arguments carried greater weight. But this very detailed and specific testimony outweighs the vagueness of the rest.   At the very least, we have found a remarkable additional witness to the limo stop from an expected source–and thanks to Tink!  And that underlines a mistake in Jim Marrs’ discounting of Witt’s story:

But that is to overlook that the film has been massively revised to conceal the true causes of the death of JFK.  One of the first and most obvious oddities of the extant film is that so many figures in Dealey Plaza, including the bystanders on the north side of Elm Street, are virtually motionless and unresponsive, even when the president is immediately before them.  This has long since appeared to be a result of taking earlier footage as the foreground and making adjustments to later footage, including the introduction of special effects, such as adding the “blob” and blood spray to make it look as though the head shot in frame 313 was fired from behind and blackening out the actual wound at the back of his head.  In order to achieve consistency between the various films, they had to change them to conform to the revised Zapruder, where removing activities like those that Witt reported would have made that task immeasurably simpler.  If he is moving around, the effects of deleting frames would have been conspicuous because of “jumps” in his actions.  It was simpler to keep him frozen, more or less as was done with Mary Moorman and Jean Hill on the opposite side of the street.

There are multiple indications that Tink’s purpose here and throughout the entire series–which, given there are 10 six-minute segments in an hour and  Errol Morris has reported he has six hours of interviews, which may mean as many as 59 more six-minute reports–is to attempt to debunk belief in conspiracy in the assassination of JFK.  His remarks about a “wing-nut” who suggested that the umbrella may have concealed a device to fire a flacehette is particularly revealing, since such a device is actually discussed in the HSCA transcript of the testimony of Louis Steven Witt. Richard Sprague and Robert Cutler were among those who took the idea seriously, where it turned out that the CIA actually had devices of this kind in 1963. So Tink was either faking it (because he was not familiar with the Umbrella man’s testimony) or deliberately distorting an odd aspect of the investigation of the assassination (which was conducted by investigators that no one else familiar with their work would describe as “wing-nuts”).

It was not irresponsible for Sprague and Cutler to endorse the flechette hypothesis when, to the best of my knowledge, (i) they did not have access to the Parkland Press Conference transcript (which was not even provided to the Warren Commission), (ii) they did not know there was a through-and-through hole in the windshield, (iii) they were apparently unaware of the tiny shrapnel wounds in JFK’s face, and (iv) they did not know that, unless the tentorium had been previously ruptured, even the near simultaneous impact of the shot to the back of his head and the frangible hit around his right temple would not have been sufficient to cause cerebellum to extrude from the world. So this appears to be a classic case of acquiring new information and new hypotheses that make a difference to understanding what took place, where, in this case, hypotheses that were previously accepted should be rejected and hypotheses that were previously rejected should be accepted. Another serious student of the assassination, Alan J. Salerian, M.D., moreover, has taken this hypothesis seriously in studies he has presented as recently as 2008.

Anyone with any lingering doubt about Tink’s betrayal of JFK research should pay close attention to what he say, where, in particular, he is suggesting there are arbitrarily many innocuous explanations for any evidence that has ever been viewed as “sinister” in the sassassination of JFK. As Cliff Varnell has remarked, “Check out the sarcasm dripping from Tink’s [use of the phrases] “really sinister” and “sinister underpinning”:

Here’s a transcript: (laughing) What it means it that, if you have any fact which you think is really sinister — it’s really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning — hey, FORGET IT, MAN, because you can never, on your own, think up all the non-sinister perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale.

And that, of course, is why Mark M., commented, “This was wonderful. The best – and most convincing – debunking of any and all conspiracy theories I have ever seen, and in just 6 minutes too.”

I hate to say “I told you so”, but I nailed Tink as working the opposite side of the street a long time ago and was attacked for doing so. I also observed earlier that, in disavowing the “double-hit” theory, he was setting himself up to proclaim that there was no conspiracy in the assassination, after all, just in time for  the 50th observance.  That we have good reasons  to believe that Witt was there, however, does not excuse his suspicious activities and association with the Cuban.  That the Secret Service would allow them to act that way in close proximity to the president is one more indication–along with more than 15 others–of Secret Service complicity in setting JFK up for the hit.   While Robert Morrow and I may not completely agree on the activities of the Umbrella man, we converge in our conclusions about the role of Josiah Thompson in this shabby affair; and for that reason, I want to give him the last word for this round of what may well turn out to be the most elaborate CIA cum New York Timesdisinformation campaign in history: