Investigating Possible Conspiracies and Cover-ups – JFK, The Moon Landings, etc.

By Wade Frazier

Revised May 2019, first published in June 2001

Introduction

Gary Wean and the JFK Assassination

Assessing the Credibility of Gary’s Story, and How it Fits the Facts

The Backyard Photos

The Nature of the JFK Assassination Affair

Why Are There So Many Conspiracy Theories Today?

The Dangers of Investigating Conspiracies and Cover-ups

What about Those American Hostages in Iran?

9/11 – The Mother of all Conspiracy Theories

Is Anything Being Covered up about the Apollo Moon Landings?

Some Apollo Mission Anomalies

Possibilities regarding the Apollo anomalies

The Nature of the Moon Landings Debate

The Big Cover-up

Footnotes

Introduction

I was born in 1958, and had a fairly typical middle class suburban American childhood (fan of Gilligan's Island and Star Trek). I was raised in Ventura, California from age eight; my mother ran the household while my father worked to support the family. His entire career was spent working for the federal government, and all but one year was spent working for the Department of Defense. The nearby military bases employed most of the area’s professionals, so some of my friends’ fathers (as well as several of my father’s friends) also worked for the military. If anything, the political outlook that I was raised with was fairly Cold War, but not too pronounced. I was taught that the Soviets were the bad guys, and my family generally supported politicians from the Democratic Party. My father was rather outraged when Nixon won the presidency in 1968, and I was saddened when Reagan beat Carter in 1980. My political outlook was fairly mainstream, which means that I was ignorant. I read the newspaper virtually everyday, from age 10 to 27, thinking that I was getting the “news.” I had some spiritual training that was useful later on, but I was like most people of my age, assimilating my indoctrination. I kept my eyes open to see how closely reality matched my ideals, because I needed to honestly believe in my ideals.

Upon graduating from college, I had a rather rude awakening as indoctrination and ideals brutally collided with reality. I eventually realized that my profession was virtually worthless, although that full realization was not clear for several years. Then I met Dennis Lee and was able to live my dreams of trying to bring alternative energy to the world. After meeting Dennis, I had a very rude awakening, and my political education began in earnest. Our efforts at developing alternative energy were definitely the targets of conspiracies. Policemen and others committed felonies while pursuing us, leading to the death of one woman. We received offers to buy us out, which culminated in an offer of around $1 billion to bribe us to stop pursuing alternative energy. Dennis rejected the offer made by “European interests,” given through a CIA man, and the next month, Dennis was thrown into jail with a $1 million bail on fabricated charges.[1]

As Dennis attained national visibility with his free energy promotion, numerous people approached us who had tried similar ventures, and we were told nightmarish accounts of being wiped out by conspiratorial activities. Kangaroo courts, prison, murder, threatening phone calls in the night, and hiding from the murderers were common tales, and were the kind that few Americans hear firsthand. It became obvious that the energy industry has maintained its technological monopoly by using extremely dirty tactics. It is one thing to hear the tales; it is quite another to live through them.

The first alternative political literature that I read, other than Christian Science Monitor (which is only slightly alternative), was conspiratorial literature, from conspiracies regarding instigating our wars, to controlling the banking system, to eliminating the USA's sovereignty. While Dennis was still in jail, I was introduced to Noam Chomsky and the political left. Ever since, I have studied scholarship such as Chomsky's far more than right-wing scholarship. I consider left-wing scholarship to be superior. The right and left both explain how the world works. Their perspectives can be divergent, but sometimes are nearly identical. It can be hazardous to over-generalize, but right-wing scholarship is often centered on conspiracies, while left-wing scholarship is more interested in the “structural” aspects of our system’s workings. The right sees the activities as more conscious (conspiratorial), while the left sees it as more unconscious (structural, institutional behavior). Fundamentalist Christians populate the right and academics populate the left. Both have their stories on how the world came to be like it is. The Christian right has the Book of Genesis, while the left has the Big Bang and evolution. One was a conscious creation, while the other was a big and unfathomable accident.

Each perspective has its strengths and weaknesses. The right can veer into outright paranoia and see a conspiracy behind every bush, as it ignores or underplays the structural aspects of what is happening. The police may throw people in jail for curing cancer, but may not know the real reason they threw them in jail (or even care). They were just following orders.

The left often suffers from a “conspiracy phobia.”[2] It has a tendency to see everything as a big accident, with institutional forces at play and few, if any, individuals really controlling a situation’s outcome. It seems afflicted by too-often rejecting the notion that people can be consciously malicious and act in concert. Only a small proportion of our populace is devoted to “evil.” In the minds of those devoted to “evil,” they are simply devoted to themselves. They see themselves as good guys, too. The path of "evil" is simply being devoted to one’s self at the extreme, and such people have made self-service a science. All the same, conscious evil is a small fraction of how the world works, which even Hitler admitted. Most of what is "bad" about humanity is due to people’s actions when they feel threatened with loss, enticed by gain, and so forth. Those on the dark spiritual path (whom those on the left might call psychopaths) easily manipulate the herd of average people, who are preoccupied with comfort and survival.

Gary Wean and the JFK Assassination

In early 1989, it appeared that Dennis had no chance of living as a free man again. There were a handful of people trying to save him from life in prison, and probably being murdered while he was in there. Although our effort was the target of a wide-ranging international conspiracy, Ventura County was also one of the USA's most corrupt counties and regularly ranked in the top-ten most corrupt law enforcement jurisdictions (it has even been ranked number one). Dennis was far from alone in being raped by Ventura County’s legal system.

In Ventura County, one person in particular was standing up to the corruption. Gary Wean was a sailor in World War II and became an LAPD policeman in 1946. Gary had the kind of career that they make movies about. He moved back and forth between Ventura County and Los Angeles a couple of times in the 1950s and 1960s, partly due to being caught in political crossfire.[3] While in Los Angeles, Gary was at times a motorcycle cop directing traffic, and at others he was a detective. He worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts. Dealing with the escapades of politicians, celebrities, and gangsters was simply part of his job.

In 1947, he pursued an armed robber through the streets of Los Angeles on a high-speed chase. The suspect crashed his car as it barreled along at 90 miles an hour. He tried escaping on foot, and Gary cornered him in the dark. The suspect begged for his life. As Gary approached, the man stuck his pistol (which had already killed somebody during the robbery) into Gary’s abdomen and fired. He fired a second shot that hit Gary in his hand. Gary then emptied his pistol into the man, while his partner also fired, which killed the robber instantly. Gary’s partner rushed him to the hospital. Although Gary’s abdomen was in great pain, he did not want to unbuckle his Sam Brown belt (a wide leather belt which held his firearm and other police equipment) as they rushed to the hospital, because he thought that it might be all that was holding him together. When Gary finally took off his belt, his partner saw that the bullet hit the belt and did not penetrate Gary’s skin.[4] That was a day in the life of an LAPD cop. Below are images from that day.

Click on image to enlarge.

Gary related many incredible incidents in his book There's a Fish in the Courthouse. Gary was from the old school; he believed in the ideal of law enforcement and the idea that through a properly functioning legal system there could be a more just society.

When I met Gary in early 1989, he gave me the best advice I could get: no organization in the USA would help Dennis, either governmental or private. Dennis’s experience was not that unusual. American judicial gangsterism was normal, but nearly always covered up or misrepresented by the media, as they are an integral part of the system. Gary's advice kept me from wasting my time seeking somebody in the USA's government to help. Gary’s insight helped lead to Dennis’s miraculous release from jail. In my hour of need, Gary was generous with his time, sincere, and helpful.

The first edition of There's a Fish in the Courthouse was published in 1987, and tells of a meeting that Gary attended in late 1963. One of Gary's closest friends was Audie Murphy, who was America's most decorated soldier who became a Hollywood movie star. During World War II, Murphy battled hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near Holtzwihr, France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle filled with explosives. It stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war. Murphy suffered from “shell shock” (now called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) for the rest of his life.

Murphy was from Texas, and Bill Decker, Dallas County's sheriff, was his friend, who also presided over Murphy’s wedding to a Hollywood actress. Decker came to California regularly on business, and when he came to town, Gary would arrange for Murphy, Decker, himself, and his partner to dine at the Police Academy. About two weeks after the JFK assassination, in early December 1963, Decker was in town and they all had lunch together. The topic of conversation quickly turned to what arms experts across the nation were discussing: how could Oswald have made those shots with that poor shooting position and mediocre rifle to kill John Kennedy? Nobody at that table thought that it was possible for Oswald to have made those shots.

After they arrived at their conclusion, Decker told them that he knew that Oswald had not fired the shots, and that a man in Dallas wanted to talk to somebody about it. Oswald died while being transferred to Decker’s custody. Decker knew somebody who could set the record straight, who wanted to talk to somebody not connected to Dallas or Washington. Murphy was interested, and the next week, Murphy, Gary, and his partner were flying to Ruidoso, New Mexico to meet Decker and his friend.

They met at the airport and went to a diner to talk. Decker's friend was named John. According to John, Oswald was anything but a “lone nut.” He was an American intelligence agent acting under the direction of E. Howard Hunt. Oswald had been recruited into military intelligence when he joined the Marines. His patronage of an expensive Tokyo nightclub as a private, his learning Russian at the highly sensitive U-2 base in Japan, his defection to the Soviet Union, and other oddities were all part of his intelligence career. His intelligence career probably began even before his Marine days, when he was a cadet in 1955 in David Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit; “coincidentally,” Oswald began his “fascination” with communism at the same time. Oswald was developing "communist" credentials for his future activities in infiltrating communist organizations. It was a fairly normal American intelligence path.[5]

Oswald was inducted into the CIA's covert activities and came under Hunt’s direction. Hunt was a major player in mounting the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he, as with many others in the military and CIA, blamed Kennedy for the failure (Kennedy refused to call in openly American air support). Hunt dreamed up the crazy assassination attempts on Castro that the United States tried. Hunt's mission in life was eliminating Castro. Oswald came into Hunt's control, and was thrown into the cauldron of the Cuban exile communities in Miami and New Orleans. Oswald did not initially know what his mission would be.

Hunt was paranoid about Oswald's Russian wife and thought that she might be a Russian spy, so Oswald could tell her nothing about his activities. Oswald’s joining Fair Play for Cuba and his staged “murder attempt” on General Walker were all part of giving Oswald “credentials” that would make his upcoming performance more believable. Hunt had concocted the most bizarre assassination intrigue of all time. Oswald was going to participate in a fake assassination attempt on John Kennedy and frame Castro for it. Oswald’s alleged visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City was part of laying an elaborate trail to Cuba. Hunt believed that if Castro could be implicated in an assassination attempt on JFK, the American people could be riled up into supporting an outright invasion of Cuba.

JFK was not aware of the fake assassination plan, but high-ranking officials in the government and his administration were. Military intelligence, the FBI, and the CIA were all involved. Oswald was initially leery of Hunt’s plan, but with assurances and after seeing the high-level people involved, he went along with it. Oswald was to fire his rifle into the air, then go into hiding, and the false trail to Cuba was laid. He could come home to a hero’s welcome and live a normal life after the USA finished mopping up Cuba.

But something went horribly wrong. The fake assassination turned into a real one. Somebody had infiltrated the operation, interposed the mission, and killed JFK. The real assassins tried killing Oswald after JFK was killed, but policeman Tippit was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was killed. Oswald escaped, to be captured alive. John said that he knew that Oswald would not have shot a policeman under any circumstances. At the end of his mind-blowing tale, John handed a thick manila envelope to Gary, sealed with wax with a thumbprint on it, which contained the documents that John said would prove his story.

Murphy, Gary, and his partner flew back to California. They knew that the situation was too big and dangerous for them to pursue. John said that if he went public with his story, he would quickly disappear, never to be heard from again. Gary had Audie store the envelope with other evidence that he was holding for Gary. A few days after that meeting, Decker called Murphy. As John was telling his story in Ruidoso, the CIA and intelligence community were in shock. They did not know what to do and were paralyzed with fear. As they recovered from their shock, they saw themselves facing the firing squad if their involvement in the assassination intrigue became known. The intelligence community decided that they would do everything they could to cover their tracks by invoking “national security.” Decker told Murphy that John had given him the envelope of documents in a moment of panic, and that if Murphy did not give the envelope back, he would be “destroyed.” Murphy did some fast thinking and told Decker that they had torn the envelope into pieces and threw the shreds out of the airplane as they were flying back to California.[6]

That is what Gary said he witnessed, and I have no doubt that he faithfully reported his experiences. In the first edition of his book, Gary hid John's identity. Because John was dead when Gary published the second edition of his book in 1996, Gary revealed that “John” was John Tower, the Senator from Texas and George Bush the First's friend whom he nominated to be the Secretary of Defense.

Gary drafted his book in the early 1970s, and his wife typed it up. New evidence keeps coming to light regarding the JFK assassination. Because of what Gary saw, I knew that Oswald was not a lone nut. The center of gravity of my research into the JFK assassination was seeing how it correlated with Gary's testimony. Every piece of credible evidence that I have seen supports Gary’s story, and none has ever contradicted it. Particularly impressive has been the revelations of Operation Northwoods, which proposed that the USA's government would stage terrorist acts in the USA to manipulate Americans into supporting an invasion of Cuba. The most formidable JFK assassination book of the early 20th century, as of 2019, was James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable, which argued for why JFK was assassinated: he was trying to end the Cold War. Gary came to the same conclusion after reading Anthony Summers’s Conspiracy.[7]

Gary’s story touches upon many facets of the JFK assassination evidence, including Oswald's military intelligence days, his association with the Cuban exiles, the “Texas Connection,” the “Republican Connection,” the oilman connection, the George Bush connection, the CIA connection, the FBI connection, and others. Until the early 21st century, Gary's testimony was ignored by virtually everybody involved in investigating JFK's assassination. It has since been cited in serious JFK works.[8] Gary was the last surviving member of that meeting with John Tower, and Gary died in 2004. Tower and Murphy both died in private plane “accidents” that Gary thought were not accidental.

Gary's career ended in Ventura County when he stumbled into corruption that beggars the imagination. Gary named names, and I knew some of the people that he named, and knew of many of the events. I independently believed his version of some events before I met him. When he encountered the corruption in Ventura, which ended his career, he fought back and survived a murder attempt himself. Those who run Ventura County are judges on the Superior Court, real estate developers, politicians, and the like. According to Gary, political murder was common in Ventura County, where judges, lawyers, and others who got in the way or were expendable were murdered, sometimes by private plane “accidents,” mysterious drownings, etc.

Hollywood has made many movies and TV shows about the police and crime in Los Angeles, especially during the 1940s, and 1950s, such as LA Confidential and Chinatown, and in ways, those movies were like chapters of Gary's career. Gary worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts during his days as an LAPD cop. Later in his career, he became an investigator for the LA District Attorney's Office. In the early days of Gary’s career, he was assigned to watch Mickey Cohen, who ran LA’s organized crime operations. Cohen, Bugsy Siegel, and Meyer Lansky were Jewish gangsters. Siegel “built” Las Vegas. Cohen ran LA's crime scene for many years. In typical gangster style, Cohen’s hangouts were often boxing arenas, racetracks, ethnic restaurants, etc. Gary followed Cohen around as part of his job. Cohen and one of his protégés, Harry Pregerson, who was a Ninth District federal judge for generations, got Gary fired from his job in the LAPD in 1952. The media and establishment have lavished praise on that judge, with awards and hagiographic articles, and he even has a freeway exchange named for him. I have noticed over the years that the most successful gangsters cultivate reputations for honesty and "liberal" stands, which is an effective method to deflect attention from their criminal behavior. I have witnessed hit men sicced on us (such as Mr. Deputy and Mr. Texas) with similar facades. Psychopaths play that game well, and they easily manipulate most people with their charms. Psychopaths make great politicians and corporate executives.

The connection between Frank Sinatra and organized crime is one of many in the entertainment field (or the CIA, or George Bush, or Joe Kennedy, or entertainment and law enforcement, such as Elvis Presley and the FBI, or the FBI and organized crime). Along with good food and pretty women, first-class entertainment is another gangster perk. Gangsters keep entertainers as their “pets” when they can (I have personal knowledge of that phenomenon). The Las Vegas connection and entertainment is a case in point. Cohen was deeply involved in the Hollywood scene.

One of Cohen’s specialties was blackmailing celebrities, such as obtaining compromising photographs of them to use as leverage. One of Cohen's successes involved Lana Turner. Johnny Stompanato was a good-looking, aspiring gangster; the kind that filled Los Angeles in those days. LA's hookers said that the Italian Stallion Stompanato was the best bedroom performer in LA, and Cohen arranged for him to meet Turner. The romance flourished. Cohen paid for a deluxe motel suite for the lovers. The bed was wired for sound. Cohen got a recording of Stompanato and Turner going at it. Cohen had two thousand copies pressed of Turner’s squeals of ecstasy. It became a hit at Hollywood parties. Some said that it was one of Turner’s finest performances. It made Cohen a lot of money, as he sold the record for $50 a copy. Turner’s daughter eventually murdered Stompanato, which created one of Hollywood’s bigger scandals. That recording became the “must have” item after Stompanato’s death, and Cohen pressed thousands more records, making big money.[9]

As Gary followed Cohen, and sometimes put him under sophisticated surveillance, Gary met members of Cohen’s entourage. In 1946, Gary saw somebody new with Cohen at the racetrack. In 1947, Gary bumped into him at a restaurant that Cohen patronized. The man knew that Gary was a cop, yet they had an interesting conversation. The man introduced himself as Jack Ruby. His real name was Jacob Rubenstein. Ruby openly told Gary that the mob was focusing its operations on New Orleans and Havana, where the action was.[10] With World War II over, the West Coast was not really the happening place anymore. Ruby murdered Oswald, and Gary presented intriguing evidence regarding the organized crime connection with the JFK assassination.

In 1948, the state of Israel was established. Menachem Begin eventually became Israel's Prime Minister. Begin was a member of the Irgun terrorist group. He helped blow up a hotel in Jerusalem, which killed many people. When Begin was Israel's Prime Minister, he could not visit the United Kingdom because he was wanted for murder there. The people who established Israel were extremely violent. Mick Cohen was involved with Begin and became an arms dealer for Israel and even donated a gunboat to Israel, which does not surprise anybody who has dug into the CIA’s alliances. Cohen said that his Jewish blood made him such a fervent supporter of Israel, but he was likely in it for the money, as usual.

In Israel’s early days, its relationship with the USA was not happy, and was particularly troubled during the Eisenhower administration.[11] It was not until the war of 1967, when Israel proved itself a murderously aggressive power in the Middle East, grabbing huge chunks of land from its neighbors, that the USA began its massive and unconditional support of Israel, which is the biggest foreign aid project in world history. In 1960, the USA's presidential election was between Nixon (Eisenhower’s vice president) and John Kennedy. Kennedy was a legendary philanderer, and Cohen and friends tried exploiting JFK’s proclivities. According to legend, JFK met Marilyn Monroe through a connection with Frank Sinatra. Right there was a possible organized crime connection, but Gary wrote that another member of the “rat pack,” Joey Bishop (who knew Cohen well - Gary wrote that Bishop even worked for Cohen), came up with the idea of introducing Monroe to JFK, and Gary looked in on Peter Lawford’s (JFK’s in-law) beach-house party when JFK and Monroe were introduced, in 1960, during the Democratic national convention. Summers told Gary that story about Bishop and Monroe.[12]

As with Stompanato and Turner, Cohen underling Georgie Piscitelli became Monroe’s lover. Cohen got a tape of them in bed together and played it for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who later received cement shoes from the Mafia and who was then feeling the heat from Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. They promised Hoffa a tape of JFK and Monroe in bed together (so that Hoffa could blackmail JFK into halting Bobby Kennedy’s efforts), but could never deliver. Monroe was being used as the world’s highest-class hooker.[13] In 2013 and 2014, new allegations of Monroe/JFK sex tapes arose.[14]

Cohen and friends wanted to know what Kennedy's intentions were toward Israel. Monroe was supposed to elicit it during pillow talk. Monroe was controlled by mobsters and was kept on all manner of narcotic. When she became increasingly uncontrollable and potentially dangerous if she publicly talked about what was happening, she was murdered. Gary had Cohen under surveillance, and caught him and Begin having a conversation in Yiddish in a diner. They were talking about Kennedy, Israel, and how much money Kennedy was wasting on the Peace Corps and other programs.[15]

Gary's testimony regarding JFK, John Tower, Marilyn Monroe, Menachem Begin, Jack Ruby, and Mick Cohen is just part of his amazing tale, which he published at great risk. By the year 2000, the only JFK assassination book that I was aware of that even mentioned Gary was Final Judgment, by Michael Collins Piper, who heavily relied on Gary’s testimony. Gary thought that Jewish gangsters were involved in interposing Hunt’s grand scheme. That does not mean that Allen Dulles (the CIA chief whom Kennedy fired over the Bay of Pigs, and who later served on the Warren Commission), J. Edgar Hoover, George Bush, and others were not also involved in interposing Hunt’s scheme and playing Hunt for a chump.

Piper was a reporter for The Spotlight, which I subscribed to for years. It has understandably been described as a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic publication. The culmination of Gary's book was uncovering a vast Jewish crime organization. It is different from the Italian Mafia, as its members are judges, politicians, and other public figures. It is a highly intelligent crime organization, which uses the pen more than the gun to achieve its goals. The most powerful criminals do not break the laws: they make and enforce the laws, to serve their own interests, not the public’s.

Gary suffered greatly at the hands of Jewish gangsters. Consequently, I believe that he took his Jewish theorizing a little too far, but it was understandable. During my days with Dennis and the horror that I lived through, I thought that policemen and lawyers were among the lowest forms of life. I have since revised my views somewhat, but I understand how brutal treatment at the hands of Jewish gangsters can lead to overgeneralizations regarding the Jewish people.

The Jewish people have had a very rough ride, especially at Christendom’s hands. The flocking of Jews to Southern California was just one more chapter in their long journeys, as they tried to find a place in the Christian world where they would not be discriminated against or murdered en masse. Consequently, Jews entered new industries such as the entertainment industry in Hollywood, and some took advantage of Prohibition, just as Italian criminals did. Cohen, Siegel, and Lansky were part of a uniquely American phenomenon. What Gary stumbled into - a Jewish underworld where the criminals were bankers, judges, lawyers, politicians, and others - is an understandable Jewish variation of organized crime. Jewish gangsters also sought “invisibility,” which is also common in corporate and other power games.

Even though Gary took his theorizing about the Jewish people too far, he was correct when he stated that Jewish apologists have been using the cry of “anti-Semitism” as a club to prevent anybody from criticizing Israel (and Gary said that the same tactic prevented the exposure of Jewish gangster activities). Noam Chomsky stated the same thing.[16] So did Native American scholar Ward Churchill.[17] Jewish scholars are definitely guilty of playing up the Jewish Holocaust and its imagined historical exclusivity, to the point where some have denied the Gypsy Holocaust of World War II. Gypsies were subject to the same extermination policies as Jews were and died alongside them in the same death camps, and may have suffered an even higher rate of extermination than Europe’s Jews did.[18]

All the same, the far-right scholarship that argues that the Jewish Holocaust never happened, or was never intended by the Nazis, is, in the words of Ward Churchill, “tripe.” If one is not familiar with scholarship’s “rules,” the Jewish-Holocaust-Never-Happened scholarship can appear reasonable. Far right scholarship on the subject is extremely biased and often appallingly bad. Typically, they use a few “facts” to establish their arguments, but then liberally add rumor, supposition, and fabrication into the mix to construct their hypotheses.

All disinformation has “truth” and “facts” in it (which makes it plausible), and to the uninitiated can unfortunately be convincing. Probably the main reason why Gary’s testimony was dismissed was because of his fervent writings about Jewish gangsters, and generalizations about the Jewish people that could easily be labeled anti-Semitic. In 1998, I submitted a brief essay about Gary’s testimony to a JFK assassination forum, and the only response was to flame me, call my writing a “fairy tale,” call Murphy a “coward” and Gary a “Nazi.” Yet, Gary’s theories had virtually nothing to do with what Gary said that he witnessed. I believe everything that Gary said he saw, including his meeting with John Tower, and Jews do not come up in the Tower conversation at all.

Testimony from other participants with military backgrounds, such as Robert Tosh Plumlee and Richard Case Nagell (who used the same alias that Oswald did), can provide further insight into that milieu.[19] A close relative was a CIA contract agent, and nobody who investigates that realm is going to find some pristine cache of declassified documents that paints the full picture. I often see that approach taken, with varying levels of naïveté displayed by the researcher, usually by those defending the establishment's version of events. Officialdom never tells the whole story in areas such as these, no matter how much it pretends to. I am privy to operations that are still classified, which I learned of from participants close to me. Many years later, I saw aspects of the issue being declassified, but plenty was still being kept secret, and will probably never be publicly revealed. This is common with the USA's federal government, and what ends up being declassified often shows how badly the government lied to the public. That just comes with the territory of such operations. The privatized operations of the Global Controllers and others are almost never revealed in any depth at all, and revelations from people such as John Perkins barely scratch the surface.

The surfacing of Operation Northwoods’s documents in 2001 (it was first declassified in 1998), made Gary’s testimony vastly more credible in public venues, as Tower’s tale is very similar to the plans as depicted in Operations Northwoods’s documents. I spent hundreds of hours examining the JFK assassination evidence since 1989, and I have never seen any piece of credible evidence contradict Gary’s testimony, and evidence has kept appearing since the 1980s that keeps confirming it. The next section will deal with Gary’s account of John Tower and JFK, and how it fits today’s evidence.

Assessing the Credibility of Gary’s Story, and How it Fits the Facts

Until the early 21st century, Gary’s testimony regarding Tower and JFK was ignored by, or unknown to, nearly everybody involved with the JFK assassination controversy. This section is written in the hope that Operation Northwoods’s revelations will spark more interest in Gary’s tale. James Bamford, who brought the Northwoods documents to American attention in his Body of Secrets, wrote that the Northwoods plan “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”[20] There is plenty of competition for “most corrupt plan” in American history.

George Washington was probably America’s richest man when he became president. He was the John Rockefeller of his time, whose fortune was anything but “clean,” and he designed the blueprint to steal the North American continent from Native Americans by forcing them to cede their lands in treaties that the USA's government would never honor. Washington’s plan was quickly adopted by the Continental Congress and was the USA's official policy until there were virtually no more native lands left to steal. Thomas Jefferson told Big Lies to both the British and Spanish ambassadors about the USA's intentions toward North American lands. The USA's government during the 19th century was more openly corrupt than in the 20th century.

The 20th century began with the USA’s consolidating its theft of the last shreds of Spain’s colonial lands, which began with robber baron William Randolph Hearst whipping up the American people to support an invasion of Cuba, to “free them” from Spain (under the false pretense that Cuba sank an American warship in Havana Harbor). The lie of the USA's “noble intentions” was immediately laid bare when it also seized the Philippines and engaged in a genocidal attack against the Filipinos when they tried becoming independent of the new imperial overlords. To the Filipinos, it mattered little if the usurpers were Spaniards, Americans, or the Japanese. While the USA was still digesting its land grabs from Spain, it engaged in its first experiment in neocolonialism with the outright theft and fabrication of Panama, separating it from Colombia, and then the USA immediately split it with the Panama Canal Zone. The USA invaded Latin America at will after creating Panama.

Panama was a free nation in name only. Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell, who co-founded Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, ran the “liberate Panama” operation. In the Panama operation, Cromwell ran a syndicate largely funded by J.P. Morgan, and the American taxpayer was ultimately swindled by their subterfuge, in the biggest single payment that the USA's government had made to that time. John Foster Dulles inherited Cromwell’s empire and became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State while his brother Allen ran the CIA. Both men were partners in Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen and John Foster were particularly fond of Nazi Germany and heavily invested in it during the 1930s. After World War II ended, Allen quickly “rehabilitated” Hitler’s biggest cheerleaders in German banking and industry and put them right back into the positions that they enjoyed while supporting Hitler’s regime. Protecting Nazi war criminals was one of Allen’s specialties, particularly Himmler’s right hand man, Karl Wolff.[21]

John Foster’s behaviors while serving as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State added a new word to the dictionary: brinksmanship. Dulles’s notion of diplomacy with the Soviet Union was threatening it with nuclear attack. The Cromwell-Dulles empire was quite active in Latin America. One of Sullivan and Cromwell’s clients was the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit, which “owned” Guatemala; both Allen and John Foster had financial interests in United Fruit. In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz became Guatemala’s president, and he nationalized some of United Fruit’s unused land, and had a plan to compensate them for it. Arbenz was a fan of Franklin Roosevelt and tried building a New Deal-style economy in Guatemala. Citing the “international communist conspiracy” fantasy, the Dulles brothers engineered the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, and the Guatemalan people were treated to a string of brutal USA-controlled dictators for more than the next 30 years, which ultimately took hundreds of thousands of lives while the entire nation (except for the ruling class) lived in misery. The year before overthrowing the Guatemalan government, the Dulles brothers reacted to Iran’s attempt to nationalize Britain’s oil monopoly by overthrowing the Iranian government. The USA began taking over Middle East oil on behalf of the American oil companies, which “coincidentally” also served Rockefeller interests. The Shah’s reign was one of the bloodier chapters in modern Middle East history.

The 1950s also saw the USA's invasion of Korea, and millions were killed. Those were also the years of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the wholesale wiping out of cancer treatments by the very same medical authorities to who helped concoct health claims for cigarettes, and the marketing of industrial waste to Americans as “medicine.” In summary, corruption was far from unknown in the USA, especially during that era, and far-right, anti-communist hysteria was imbedded in America’s psyche as deeply as any catechism ever was. People such as Ralph McGehee eventually discovered what a Big Lie anticommunist ideology was. It was a smokescreen designed to disguise and protect imperial/corporate prerogatives.

When Castro’s revolutionaries finally overthrew an American puppet in Latin America in 1959, the super-hawks in the Eisenhower administration could barely contain themselves. As with most called “communist,” Castro was originally simply an anti-imperialist and nationalist, and Cuba has long had Latin America’s highest standard of living, ever since the Cuban Revolution (there are no homeless in Cuba, which the USA could learn from). The thought that other Latin American nations might follow Cuba’s example and break free of the USA's domination was intolerable, and in the 1960s and 1970s the USA overthrew more than a dozen elected Latin Americas governments and installed American-backed dictatorships, some of which were among the 20th century’s bloodiest regimes.[22] The official reason why the USA has named Cuba a pariah nation and led economic warfare against it since the 1950s is because of its “human rights” violations. The USA's puppet governments in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s made Castro’s Cuba appear saintly. The same went for Colombia, which was Earth’s most violent nation when the Colombian government received vast sums of arms from the USA, to “fight terror.” The rationale used to be to fight “communists,” and then “drug dealers” after the Soviet Union collapsed, and then it became fighting “terror” in Colombia. What will the future rationale be? The same peasants are being killed and the same oil companies are salivating at the prospects of exploiting the region.

Eisenhower was incensed that the Cuban Revolution came during his watch, and asked his military leaders to “think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” to justify invading Cuba. Eisenhower even harbored those ideas as a lame duck president, soon before JFK’s inauguration.[23] Shortly before Eisenhower left office, he appointed a hawk among hawks, General Lyman Lemnitzer, to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ("JCS"). Lemnitzer thoroughly distrusted civilian politicians and believed that the military should run the American government. Ironically, Lemnitzer’s kind may be just what Eisenhower warned against when he ominously spoke of the growing power of the “military-industrial complex,” three days before he left office.

The antagonism between the military and CIA goes back to World War II, when Wild Bill Donovan and other Wall Street lawyers and executives founded and ran the Office of Strategic Services (OSS - the direct forerunner of the CIA), and they prevailed in the battle over who ran the USA's intelligence scene, and quickly hired Nazis to staff the CIA after World War II ended.

JFK came to office as the CIA was about to mount an invasion of Cuba. The CIA had Patrice Lumumba murdered just before JFK took office, as he would never support such an operation, and no American president before or since was friendlier to African nations.[24] Lemnitzer knew that the Bay of Pigs operation would be a disaster, but remained silent. JFK's advisors (CIA and JCS) were trying to force him into position to openly use the USA's military in an invasion to overthrow Cuba's government.[25] The Bay of Pigs debacle cost Allen Dulles his job but did nothing to cool the hawks’ ardor. While E. Howard Hunt, who planned the Bay of Pigs operation (and would later plan the Watergate break-in and earlier helped overthrow the Guatemalan government), was devising ways to assassinate Castro, with plans seemingly out of Maxwell Smart’s spy manual, General Lemnitzer and friends devised plans to justify invading Cuba, and Operation Northwoods was conceived. The documents only came to light when Oliver Stone’s film JFK inspired the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board ("ARRB"), which was formed in 1994.

An ARRB member tipped off Bamford as to the documents’ existence, and they might be the only documents like them to survive Lemnitzer’s document-destroying fervor. What kinds of plans are in the Northwoods documents? An early idea was to stage a fake attack on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The Northwoods ideas became increasingly extreme, and one plan was blowing up the rocket that John Glenn was about to fly in and somehow blame Cuba. They planned plane hijackings and bombings of American cities. One plan that has received attention from 9/11 conspiracy theorists was to stage an incident over Cuba with a drone plane made to look like an airliner. The plane would self-destruct over Cuba to make it appear as if Cuba shot it down. Lemnitzer reported to John McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense. Lemnitzer increasingly fell from grace in the JFK administration, and a few days after Lemnitzer tried broaching his grand plan to McNamara, JFK told Lemnitzer that there was no chance of the USA ever using direct military force against Cuba. That was in 1962, and Lemnitzer soon lost his job as the JCS chairman, but Bamford wrote, “Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning ‘pretext’ operations at least into 1963.”[26]

Having the military and government devising plans, no matter how insane, bloody, or evil they might seem, does not mean that they were ever approved or implemented. When McNamara was confronted with the Northwoods revelations, he denied that Lemnitzer ever showed him the plan, which may have been true. JFK’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen also denied such a plan, saying that it would have been “illegal” and “unwise.” Being illegal and unwise has rarely stopped the USA's government from doing anything, particularly during the “War on Terror” and invasion of Iraq. Before the Soviet Union set off its first nuclear bomb, the USA's military had a plan for dropping dozens of atomic bombs on the Soviet Union, and then using the USA's Nazi-allies to finish the job. Cooler heads fortunately prevailed. Similarly, after the USA dropped atom bombs on Japan, there were still die-hard Japanese generals who rejected surrender. The man who designed the kamikaze attack strategy proposed a post-Hiroshima plan to sacrifice about 20 million Japanese citizens in a special kamikaze attack. Once again, sanity prevailed.

Whether the Northwoods plan was ever implemented, or capable of implementation, is not the point I am making. My point is that the Northwoods plan was eerily similar to the tale that Gary reported. The plan that John Tower spoke of seems to have been a CIA parallel to the JCS plan or perhaps its offspring or parent. The plans are so similar, in aims and means, that to not take Gary’s testimony seriously is to ignore the evidence. Not only are the plans remarkably similar, with one targeting the American public for “terror” and the other targeting the head of state, but it is widely recognized that the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 was either exaggerated or fabricated by the USA's government, in the spirit of the Northwoods plan, which was not lost on Bamford in his book. I know somebody who worked for the U.S. Navy in 1964, and he told me that some of his work was used by the Navy to fabricate the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The Gulf of Tonkin incident initiated the devastation of Southeast Asia, which killed several million people, and the American government’s motives were obviously fraudulent.

Fabricating incidents to justify invasion is a very old game. The USA initiated/fabricated a border incident to justify the huge land grab known as the Mexican-American War. Hitler probably had his minions burn the Reichstag to “justify” his police state, and Hitler’s crew dressed up concentration camp inmates in Polish uniforms to fabricate a border incident to justify invading Poland, which began World War II. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was certainly no “surprise” to the American military brass, and there is substantial evidence that the American men in Pearl Harbor were sacrificed to lure the isolationist American people into World War II. Michael Ruppert and others have presented compelling evidence that the World Trade Center attacks had prior knowledge by many people, with some foreknowledge perhaps extending to the White House. In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly bragged about the USA’s arming and inciting the Afghani “rebels” as a way to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and its “Vietnam.” Brzezinski’s little plan killed and/or devastated many millions of people, as he played his global chess game. Thinking that Hunt’s alleged plan is “too far out” is to be ignorant of history, and/or falling prey to the myth of American exceptionalism, as every nationalist ideology encourages.[27] Hunt’s last conversation with the original Watergate attorney shows that Hunt did not think that Oswald was a lone assassin, and that JFK’s assassination was likely related to his efforts to end the Cold War.

Gary wrote most of his book during the early 1970s, as he was trying to survive what the gangsters who ran Ventura County dished out, and his wife typed it up. He first published his book in 1987. Gary was basically run out of California for his trouble. Gary’s book is more like a diary than anything else, and is certainly not a work of scholarship. Because I knew Gary a little, and he and I lived in the same milieu for a while (bearing the brunt of evil served up by the same people), and I got to see his integrity and helpfulness in action, I have always believed what he reported as his experiences.

In the early 21st century, a policeman who actually witnessed events that Gary wrote about contacted me and verified their authenticity. That policeman also thought that Gary's writings about Jewish gangsters and generalizations about the Jewish people were over-the-top, but in the aftermath of the USA's invasion of Iraq, with the flacking for war led by Jewish neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, that policeman began to openly wonder if Gary was right. My astronaut colleague Brian O'Leary once briefed Perle and Wolfowitz, along with other military establishment figures, and he thought that they all acted strangely.

Gary’s theories, particularly about the Jewish mob and Jewish people, I have considerable skepticism about. True skepticism, however, means pursuing the truth, not dismissing something out of hand with a priori reasoning, as the “skeptical” crowd has a penchant for. People who survive Gary’s kind of experiences are not going to publish a book like his in the hopes that it makes a lot of money or deceives the public, but to tell a story that needs to be told. In that regard, Gary is like Ralph McGehee, Rodney Stich and Dennis Lee, and he will always have my greatest respect for his courage and willingness to face the dark underbelly of our vaunted system and try to do something about it. There are not many like Gary, whatever extremes of theorizing his arduous journey may have led him to engage in.

Even if Gary’s timing of the Tower conversation is discounted (three weeks after the assassination), or when Gary wrote about it (about ten years later), many details of the Tower conversation did not come into public awareness until after Gary first published his book in 1987. The Northwoods documents and the plans for framing Cuba have not come into public awareness until relatively recently. The revelations of what really happened between the USA and Cuba during the 1960s did not start becoming public knowledge until the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and documents began to come forward from the former Soviet Union. Ironically, researchers have often encountered more document availability in the former Soviet Union than they have in the USA. Some revelations have been chilling, such as the fact that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK administration hawks wanted to invade Cuba, there were already numerous nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, aimed at the USA and ready to go. The Soviet commander in charge of the Cuban nukes admitted that if the USA had invaded Cuba, he would have fired the nukes. It is the closest that the world has ever come to a nuclear holocaust, and it was only JFK's overriding his hawks that kept (a very short-lived) World War III from happening. In light of those revelations, a plan to frame Castro to justify invading Cuba is right out of Dr. Strangelove.

In James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable, the case is strongly made that JFK and Khrushchev both knew that they brought humanity to the brink of an all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis and they both began to work to end the Cold War. They both had to fight their own people more than the "enemy," and JFK may have paid with his life for trying to end the Cold War.

A significant possible connection between Lemnitzer’s plan and Tower’s tale is General Edwin Walker. Walker was Lemnitzer’s soul brother, as Walker was a John Birch Society member as well as a Ku Klux Klan ("KKK") member. Walker helped initiate a “race riot” in Little Rock in 1961 and handed out John Birch material to his troops. Walker’s antics cost him his career, and a pre-JFK-assassination Senate investigation into Walker suspected that Lemnitzer was connected to Walker’s efforts. Oswald’s “assassination attempt” on Walker sure raises more suspicion than it did before the Northwoods documents surfaced, particularly in light of Gary’s tale.

The framing Cuba angle was certainly not in public awareness in 1963 or 1987, and I believe that only with the Northwoods documents, which did not come to American public awareness until 2001, that the framing Cuba angle has become publicly known as government policy. For cautious researchers, it would be most prudent to compare Gary’s book versus what was publicly known in 1987. There is plenty of JFK-associated evidence that has come to light since 1987, which further confirms Gary’s tale, but it will be up to other researchers, not me, to nail down what all those pieces might be. I want to paint a possible picture that accounts for Gary’s reporting, and I have no doubt that the bulk of his reporting of the John Tower conversation is as straight as Gary could tell it, with perhaps some minor shading of it, unconsciously, by events that happened after the Tower conversation and before Gary wrote about it.

If Gary’s tale is true, many people around the “fake assassination” project were unaware that it would turn into a real assassination, especially Lee Harvey Oswald. Up until November 22, 1963, the USA was in denial about a lot of things, and the naïveté of Americans back then was fairly astonishing; about 85% of Americans had “great faith” in America’s institutions (governments, corporations, churches, etc.), which was only about 15% in the late 20th century (or even lower, in the 21st century's “War on Terror,” priest-pedophilia, Enron days). However, many lived lives of quiet desperation, with American housewives being the biggest customer class of Librium when it was introduced in the 1950s (and Valium, AKA “Mother’s Little Helper,” in the early 1960s), to keep them doped up so they could try acting the part of June Cleaver, getting the newspaper, dinner, slippers and pipe ready for her husband as he returned home from the office or factory.

Until the bullets hit JFK, Oswald, Hunt, Tower, and quite a few others were probably being played as chumps by whoever achieved the JFK hit. The fabrication of Oswald’s trail to Cuba, his “commie” credentials and the like were probably not done as carefully as they would be today. That is because the American public was so trusting that they would swallow anything that officialdom told them. Whether that was in fact true, it is reasonable to think that Hunt and friends operated under that assumption. In Hunt’s designs, the trail to Cuba would not be subject to much public scrutiny, and would only be needed until the Cuban invasion and Castro's overthrow was complete.

Oswald was seen in the book depository lunchroom soon after JFK’s shooting, and the Warren Commission had to construct an involved scenario to explain Oswald’s alleged movements. The evidence tends to support the idea that Oswald sat in the lunchroom the entire time period surrounding the assassination.[28] If the mission was interposed, Oswald would have certainly not have been in the “sniper’s nest” as a real assassination was being carried out. The likeliest series of events was that Oswald was told to go to the lunchroom and await further orders, or perhaps wait for a phone call. It is hard to say when Oswald realized that he had been set up, but it was probably less than a minute after JFK was shot. The “fake” plan would have called for Oswald to leave the building anyway, as even a fake hit would have brought plenty of attention onto the book depository. Because of the Single Bullet's (AKA "Magic Bullet’s") wildly improbable tale, I think it likely that people on the real assassination team set up the “sniper’s nest.”[29]

If Hunt’s operation was infiltrated, it is hard to know just who was on the “inside” and who was not. Even on Oswald’s “team,” it is hard to know who was really on the inside in Dallas and who was among Hunt’s chumps. The story generally agreed upon is that Oswald left the book depository before police sealed the building and walked seven blocks to catch a bus. He soon left the bus and took a cab.[30] Depending on what testimony and evidence is believed, Oswald entered the movie theater before policeman J.D. Tippit was murdered, or soon afterward. If Oswald was the intelligence operative that Tower said he was, he may have had a “double,” and the double may have been in town as part of the real hit team. Whatever the real events were, according to Tower’s tale, Oswald realized that he was set up and was doing his best to stay out of jail, and alive. He always referred to himself as a patsy, which is not the stance that one would expect for an assassin.

If Tower’s tale is true, Oswald’s trail to Cuba may have been fabricated, perhaps including his trip to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The photographic record in Oswald's military and CIA files may well be fabricated or altered. If Tower’s tale is true, there is little information that came from the FBI or CIA that can be relied upon, which includes nearly all the evidence that the Warren Commission considered, because the “investigators” for the Warren Commission were the FBI and CIA. The Warren Commission's lead counsel, J. Lee Rankin, later believed that the Warren Commission had been deeply compromised by the CIA and FBI. The Warren Commission accepted at face value the CIA- and FBI-produced evidence, with Allen Dulles on the commission. Allen Dulles is one of the primary assassination suspects in JFK research circles, and he essentially led the investigation.[31] Another member of the Warren Commission's rogues' gallery was John McCloy. A Rockefeller asset, McCloy was a member of a group that invested $100,000 and made $44 million in profits building ships during World War II. Perhaps McCloy's most infamous act was the brief that he submitted to the USA's Supreme Court that justified the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He had the section edited out of the brief that showed that Japanese-American citizens were not considered a threat to the USA. The declassified version of the brief proved McCloy's deception, which likely resulted from his racist views, but that act has competition in the infamy department. McCloy was centrally responsible for "rehabilitating" many Nazis and bringing them into prominent positions in the CIA and elsewhere, which led to programs such as MKUltra.[32] McCloy decided to use the Nazi spymaster, Reinhard Gehlen, to run the West German secret service. Gehlen's activities nearly led to World War III. McCloy initially felt that the Warren Report belabored the Magic Bullet theory on thin evidence, but his good friend Allen Dulles convinced him of Oswald's guilt. I consider it highly relevant that in 2013, in an event marking the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, Robert Kennedy's son admitted that the Kennedy family never believed the Warren Commission's conclusion, and that Robert Kennedy considered the Warren Report to be a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship," and that the CIA and Mafia were probably involved in JFK's death.

Gary’s story fits startlingly with the main lines of evidence and speculation that swirl around Oswald, and there is enough uncertainty regarding various details that I have seen no credible avenue of evidence and theory regarding a conspiracy that Gary’s testimony may not fit with. With the Northwoods revelations, nobody can easily dismiss/ignore Gary’s testimony. Joseph Milteer’s prediction of the JFK hit has been taken seriously by most JFK researchers, even though he was a right wing, KKK-type of guy. Gary was a policeman and investigator, with a solid career going until he ran afoul of the gangsters that run Ventura County. Does being Audie Murphy’s friend count for anything, as far as Gary's credibility? If nothing else, the Northwoods documents may end up giving Gary’s tale due consideration, and Douglass's recent thesis is something that Gary also wrote about long ago. Gary’s experiences with Jack Ruby, Mick Cohen, and the Jewish mob also need to be considered.

In 2006, I encountered two Internet forums that earnestly discussed Gary’s encounter with John Tower and Audie Murphy. They were about the first worthy discussions that I had seen of that issue, and I discovered that Gary passed away in 2004. I had rewarding exchanges with one forum and exchanges with an impressive investigator who informed me that he does not know of any piece of credible evidence that contradicts Gary’s story, and knows of no reason why his tale would not be true, and I have seen Gary's tale discussed in other serious venues, and nobody that I respect has dismissed it. In 2018, I wrote an account of my relationship with Gary, and it may be my last word on the subject.

There are numerous lines of JFK evidence to pursue, which could easily take a person’s lifetime. This essay will deal with just one aspect of the JFK assassination evidence in detail, and people can make up their own minds regarding the truth of the issue, and see if it is worth pursuing further.

The Backyard Photos

On the day of JFK's assassination, after Oswald was arrested, the police (Gus Rose and Richard Stovall) searched the home where his estranged wife, Marina, lived. Oswald was accused of murdering the head of state of the world’s most powerful nation, and the investigation was underway. It is difficult to imagine a murder investigation that would have been carried out with more zeal and thoroughness than that one. The Dallas police descended on Ruth Paine’s house on November 22nd, where Marina lived and where Lee stayed the night before. Ms. Paine let the police come in and search, even though they did not have a search warrant. Lee's possessions were largely stored in Ms. Paine's garage, which was attached to the house. The police thoroughly searched the premises that day and seized many items.

When the Dallas police searched the Paine's home and garage on the day of the assassination, they did not discover the photographs, even though they seized many items, including two cameras. In the two inventories that the police made of Oswald's possessions, those photos are not mentioned. Also, detective Rose, the man who discovered the photos, testified that he found two negatives. Only one has ever been produced (a vast amount of evidence disappeared during the JFK assassination investigation[33]). There is a great deal of evidence of altered testimony by the Warren Commission, too. Michael Paine testified that he saw a backyard photo on the day of the assassination.

In one of numerous anomalies regarding the backyard photos, according to the notes made by Oswald's interrogator, Will Fritz, at an interrogation session at 12:35 PM the day after the assassination, he asked Oswald about where he lived, to find out where the picture of him holding the rifle was taken.[34] The search "discovered" two photographs at 3:20 PM that day, and the detectives (Rose and John McCabe) did not leave the Paines' home until 5:00 PM. Oswald was shown the photographs at a 6:00 PM interrogation and denied that they were of him, and that his head had been pasted onto somebody else's body. According to the official documentation, Oswald was being asked about the backyard photographs before they were officially discovered. According to Jim Marrs's 1970 interview of Robert and Patricia Hester, who worked on the night of the assassination at the National Photo Lab, processing photographs for the Secret Service and FBI, they saw color transparencies of the backyard photographs in the FBI's possession the day before they were "discovered." The backyard photos comprise one of many areas where the policemen's testimony does not jibe with the evidence. The Warren Commission's defenders have constantly attributed such anomalies to "mistakes," and the doubters argue that something more sinister explains them.

In the photos, Oswald is shown holding the rifle and radical newspapers. Another problem is the papers themselves. Before 1960, communism had split into two factions; one was revolutionary and the other sought peaceful co-existence with the capitalist/imperialist world. The two publications that Oswald held up, The Militant and The Worker, both supported the peaceful co-existence approach. Oswald lived in the Soviet Union and was well aware of the split, and Soviet communism had embraced the peaceful co-existence approach. Trying to make a reputation as a militant by holding up those publications would be like holding up the New York Times to help establish one's reputation as a right-wing radical. Nearly all of the evidence presented by the Warren Commission and others to portray Oswald as some kind of communist fail pretty spectacularly. Oswald was a Marine with a security clearance, who worked on the Japanese base where the U-2 missions originated. After his discharge from the Marines in 1959, he walked into the American embassy in Moscow to renounce his citizenship and announce his intention to become a Soviet citizen. He also announced that he planned to tell the Soviets everything that he knew from his Marine Corps days. The next year, while Oswald lived in the Soviet Union, as almost certainly part of the CIA's fake dissident program, a U-2 plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. The captured pilot later publicly stated that Oswald may have been involved with his plane being shot down, and Oswald attended the pilot's initial interrogation. Like so many JFK-related witnesses, that pilot died the week before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations ("HSCA") about those events, when his helicopter ran out of fuel while flying over Ventura County, which is a method of murder that Gary Wean regularly encountered in Ventura County. That is quite a "coincidence." CIA documents showed that the USA never believed that that U-2 plane was actually shot down. There is a vast amount of information that points to Oswald’s being anything other than a rogue commie Marine who somehow moved around the spook world with ease and was trained and befriended by all manner of spook and CIA asset in the years leading up to JFK's assassination. The Edward Snowden saga has been playing in recent years, with him in political asylum in Russia and who would instantly land in an American prison if he ever came home. At the height of the Cold War, a Marine with a security clearance moved to the Soviet Union while announcing his intentions to give the Soviets his secrets in what is arguably the greatest Marine defection ever. The next year, the plane that he worked with was downed over the Soviet Union, which became a huge international incident. Two years later, the defector decided to come back to the USA and was welcomed with open arms. It greatly stretches the imagination to think that he would be treated that way if he was a genuine defector. Castro publicly noted that anomaly in Oswald’s background the day after JFK’s death.

In 1960, while Oswald was in the Soviet Union, Hoover wrote a memo stating that an imposter might be using Oswald's birth certificate. Several different people were identified as Oswald before the JFK assassination, and it appears that there were two Oswalds for a decade before the JFK assassination, and one may have helped set up the other as a patsy. Hoover was well aware of two different Oswalds, and on the day of the assassination, the FBI seized all evidence of one of the Oswalds, and those records never made it into the official evidence.

The Oswald in custody said that he would be able to prove that those pictures were fakes. All he was able to prove was his mortality, as Jack Ruby gunned him down the next day. With Oswald dead and unable to defend himself, the wheels of the government and media turned, and Oswald was eventually pronounced as JFK's lone assassin.

During the Warren Commission investigation those backyard photographs became known as exhibits 133-A and 133-B.

Warren Exhibit 133-A

Warren Exhibit 133-B

Life put 133-A on its cover in 1964. Even though it was probably listed in the evidence that the police seized, the negative to 133-A has never been produced. Only the negative to 133-B has been produced. If that ended the tale of "discovering" the photographs, it would be strange enough, but the plot gets thicker.

In 1967, George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian anticommunist aristocrat who worked for CIA front organizations and took Oswald the commie under his wing and probably got him the job at the book depository, discovered another version of 133-A in his possessions after he moved back to America from Haiti. De Mohrenschildt, who "committed suicide" immediately after the HSCA contacted him, did not know where the photograph came from and suspected that it was planted there to further frame Oswald. The strange thing about de Mohrenschildt's photo is that it is a clearer picture than the original 133-A, and views area outside the frame of the original 133-A. There is wide-ranging speculation about that situation. How did de Mohrenschildt come to possess a higher quality photo than the "original," and how was it developed? Those questions broach issues of authenticity not easily answered. The de Mohrenschildt story is bizarre on several levels. In a work unrelated to the JFK assassination, a long discussion of de Mohrenschildt and his relationship to Allen Dulles’s geopolitics can be found.[35] He was part of the oil-soaked machinations of Rockefeller-fixer Dulles in Indonesia, as a prelude to the USA’s support of Suharto’s coup and his multiple subsequent genocides that American media either applauded or ignored, as Suharto was a “good genocidist.”

To further fuel the controversy, another backyard photograph was discovered in the possession of the widow of Dallas policeman Roscoe White and given to the HSCA in 1976. The widow once worked for Jack Ruby, for one of many "it's a small world" connections with the assassination. Detective Stovall also gave the same photo to the HSCA in 1978. That photograph is now known as 133-C. The position of Oswald in 133-C is markedly different from 133-A or 133-B. In 133-C, Oswald is holding the newspapers up in the air with his right hand, and the rifle in the air with his left. Neither 133-A nor 133-B depict that posture. In 1964, as police were recreating the backyard photos scenario, photos were taken using the same posture as in 133-C.

The Dallas police department obviously knew about 133-C in 1964. In a familiar pattern, a negative disappeared from evidence and an unreported photo emerged a decade later.

The very origin of the photos is in question. What about the camera that took them? The camera allegedly used to take the photographs was an Imperial Reflex camera. How was that camera found? On the day of the assassination, when the photos were not yet “discovered,” the police seized plenty of photographic equipment. The Dallas police discovered a miniature Minox camera, the kind that spies used. It is about the size of a large cigarette lighter. Oswald the starving commie certainly could not afford one of those. Even stranger was the serial number that the Dallas police recorded off of that camera: serial # 27,259. Years later, Minox reported that the serial numbers of their cameras sold during 1963 were above 135,000. Oswald apparently had some vintage spy equipment. The FBI tried to get the Dallas police to restate their original report to record seizing a Minox light meter, not a camera. The Dallas police refused to reclassify the camera and it disappeared during the FBI's investigation. The FBI later listed it as a light meter. Gerald Posner claimed to have solved that mystery. He claimed to have interviewed Ruth Paine's husband Michael, who said it was his camera, and one that he possessed since the 1950's.[29]

That spy camera makes the mystery of the Imperial Reflex camera even more puzzling. Michael Paine did classified work for Bell Helicopter, which might explain his "spy" camera. It might be innocent, but it is one more odd connection with the intelligence community, in which a woman married to a man who did classified work for the government took in Marina Oswald, the wife of a defector. Marina and Ms. Paine met because of Ms. Paine's avid interest in the Russian language, or so it is said. The FBI seized a number of cameras, and the Imperial Reflex camera was not taken in the first search, nor the second, nor even a later one by the FBI, when they seized the rest of Oswald's possessions. The police even seized a camera that supposedly was not Oswald's, but it was up to Oswald's brother Robert to stumble upon that Imperial Reflex camera on December 8th, 1963, in that magical garage that kept spewing out evidence not discovered or taken in earlier searches. The original documents show that the camera was noted in the original search, for another investigative anomaly.

That Imperial Reflex camera officially became the one that took the infamous photographs. When Marina Oswald was first asked about the photographs, she claimed that she had never taken any. Later she would testify that she remembered one photograph being taken. Her testimony was later amended to say she had taken two photographs, in light of the fact that two photographs were introduced into evidence. She then amended her testimony to state that she took all three photographs now known to exist. She may eventually "remember" more, because the original FBI inventory lists four of them. There was allegedly a photo of Oswald holding the rifle over his head, which his mother found and destroyed. In light of Marina's constantly changing testimony, she is not regarded as a reliable witness, partly because her position was highly vulnerable and she was subject to manipulation by the authorities.

When asked when she took them, Marina originally said it was in the winter of 1963, nearly a year before the assassination. However, the scene depicted in those photographs shows a yard in bloom. Also, the newspapers Oswald held up were not published until the spring. After more prodding of Marina and investigation by the Warren Commission, it has been determined that the likeliest date for the photographs to have been taken was March 31st, 1963. That date corresponds to shortly after Oswald allegedly mail-ordered the rifle, pistol, and papers that he displays in those photos. It also corresponds to the timing of Oswald's “assassination attempt” on General Walker on April 10th. Soon after the Walker incident, de Mohrenschildt met Oswald one last time, and they never met again.

There are a few problems with the alleged photo date of March 31. March 31 may have been too early in the year for the plants and trees in the photos to be in bloom. What is more problematic about the March 31 date is that the photographs were taken in bright sunshine, but the weather records for Dallas on that date show that it was cloudy with traces of rain all day. There are a couple more oddities to consider before getting to the actual photo analysis. One is that when the FBI finally received custody of the Imperial Reflex camera in February of 1964, it did not work, and when it was first shown to Marina, she was unable to identify it as belonging to her husband, even though she supposedly used it. When she was asked how to use that camera, she thought that she held it up to her face, as with most cameras, but the viewfinder in that camera was on top of it, and the camera was held at the waist. The other oddity is that the Oswald in the photos is wearing a black shirt, black pants, and a distinctive wristwatch. After the assassination, the investigators could not find in Oswald's possessions the black shirt, black pants, or the wristwatch, and nobody ever remembered Oswald wearing that wristwatch.

While performing the research for producing this web site, I had to delve into many controversial areas. The only way to resolve the issues to my satisfaction was to try ignoring what all sides had to say and evaluate the primary evidence for myself and try to become my own expert. For a “one-man-show,” that is a tall task, so I have often relied on secondary evidence, but I also looked at the broad spectrum of secondary evidence (while correlating primary to secondary evidence when I could, to get a feeling for how reliable certain secondary evidence might be), and tried digesting all the available evidence into something coherent. The JFK issue was no exception.

Jack White deserves credit for his analysis of the backyard photos. White began his investigation with some expertise in photography and he devoted years to analyzing the backyard photos. The reason he did so was two-fold. The main one was that Oswald himself said that the backyard photos were faked, and his head was pasted onto somebody else’s body. The other was that White asked for and was given advice on how to pursue the JFK evidence, and was told to become expert on just one piece of it and focus his attention there. White did so, and a fair bit of the evidence produced in this essay relied in some measure on what he discovered. White deserves credit for the work he performed. However, White’s analysis of the backyard photographs is not wholly reliable because of his limitations as a photographic expert. Specifically, he has no training or expertise in the field of photogrammetrics, and all of his photogrammetric analysis is suspect.

In 2001 and 2002, I watched White post his analyses of Apollo lunar photographs to a JFK forum, to make the case that the Moon landings were faked. None of his Apollo photo analysis stood up to the slightest scrutiny. To be fair, I have never seen any photo analysis of “faked” Apollo footage that has ever stood up to scrutiny, as far as it proving that the Moon landings were faked, and White proved himself badly out of his element in analyzing the Apollo images. White later tried proving that the Zapruder film was faked, and one of his central analyses, which David Mantik wrote produced “robust” data, has failed to impress upon scrutiny.[30] I later saw White try to make the case for altered 9/11 photographs, and they also did not convince me of anything other than White was out of his element.

White’s work obviously has its limitations. Proving his photographic analyses wanting, however, does not prove the case that the backyard photographs are genuine. Albert Einstein said that he had little respect for somebody who looked for the weakest spot of a board and repeatedly drilled holes through it. White’s “photogrammetric” analyses are the weakest parts of his work and should be considered as such. White’s critics have rarely strayed beyond his lack of photogrammetric expertise in assailing his work. Even amateurs can stumble forward, as I did when discovering Neil Armstrong’s leap back to the Apollo 11 LM. When a musician felt that he found evidence that disproved the acoustic evidence of the HSCA, which was the linchpin in its “conspiracy” finding, the “lone gunman” theorists fell over themselves in congratulating him on his find. Amateurs have made many of science’s breakthroughs.

Evidence can theoretically stand on its own, no matter who produces it. That is the scientific method's ideal. The following analysis will focus on the evidence that most strongly supports to arguments for fakery in the backyard photos, and will also demonstrate that whatever White’s limitations are, the official investigators for the USA's government performed incredibly flawed, if not intentionally flawed, analysis, which brings up the suspicion of fraud.

After looking long and hard at the evidence, I think that the most impressive evidence, as far as photographic fakery in the backyard photos is concerned, exists in four areas:

The anomaly of Oswald’s chin;

The nearly identical position of the camera in the photos;

The shadow anomalies;

The anomalies relating to Oswald’s head, arms and hands, and the rifle and leftist newspapers he is holding, including some shadow anomalies.

Jack White adduced other evidence, such as Oswald’s strange posture in 133-A and evidence of retouching. Although the other evidence may provide supporting evidence of fakery, the lines of evidence listed above seem the most impressive to me, and are also areas where the official explanations usually dealt with the evidence in an unsatisfactory manner.

In 1994, Michael T. Griffith, one of the more prominent independent JFK investigators, spent three hours interviewing photographic expert Brian Mee while examining the evidence. Griffith consulted several other specialists in the field, and their judgments concurred with Mee’s and have influenced this essay. Mee had expertise in exactly the areas that concern the evidence discussed below.

Before beginning this analysis, I will present my opinion of how the photos were probably faked, if they were faked. They were probably faked just as Oswald said, by pasting his head onto somebody else’s body. Also, there are enough strange anomalies with his head, hands, arms, and the rifle and newspaper he holds that there may indeed be several “special” effects pasted into the picture (or altered), to further incriminate Oswald. The photos in evidence are probably at least one generation removed from the original composite photos, and each succeeding generation had degraded clarity, as with any analog copying process.

A legitimate question, in light of Gary Wean’s tale and the notion that they were trying to fabricate Oswald’s violent reputation, is this: why would they feel the need to fabricate the backyard photographs, especially when Oswald was playing along with the game? I have long pondered that question, and I am not sure what the answer might be. The two Oswalds issue may resolve it. Claiming that the backyard photos are genuine would eliminate that seeming contradiction, but for Oswald to call them fakes, and promise that he would be able to prove that they were, is significant. Also, there are so many inconsistencies in how the photographs made their way into the evidence, and conflicting evidence surrounding the photos themselves (such as March 31, 1963 being a cloudy day, or how none of them were “discovered” when they should have been, and the 133-C photo’s travels casts grave doubts on the Dallas PD’s investigative effort), that their authenticity must be seriously questioned. It is highly possible that the rifle that Oswald allegedly ordered is not the one found in the book depository and may not even be the one in the photographs. There are suspicions that the second Oswald fabricated the trail to Mexico City and Cuba. The backyard photos may have been part of an entire body of evidence that was being used to fabricate Oswald’s “violent” tendencies and communist sympathies. There are many scenarios that could have played out, when Hunt’s little plot and the plot-within-a-plot are considered. I acknowledge that faking the backyard photographs can seem initially inconsistent with fabricating Oswald’s violent image, but only those who know the whole story know for sure, if anybody does, and if any of them are still alive.

If Oswald’s head was pasted on somebody else’s body, it is legitimate to search for where that might be, and the area that leaps out to even casual observers is Oswald’s chin. There are several pieces of impressive evidence relating to his chin and photographic fakery. The two most impressive pieces of evidence are the shape of his chin and a line that crosses it, from one edge of his neck to the other, which looks exactly like a crop line, exactly where one might be expected.

If Gary Wean’s tale is in any way true, nothing in the federal government’s files about Oswald is above suspicion, and with the “double” speculations about him, the photographic evidence of Oswald’s younger days must be viewed with suspicion. In Jack White’s second video about the backyard photographs, he presented several photos of Oswald from the government-produced evidence, and made the case that several photos appear to be composites. I have not seen anybody effectively dispute White’s analysis in that matter. What I doubt can be effectively disputed, however, are the mug shots of the man who was captured the day of the assassination, and who died in police custody. Below are comparisons of Oswald’s chin from his mug shots, compared with backyard photo 133-A, and also a man with a square chin is on the right hand side of the below image.

Oswald transformed from a square-chinned guy in the backyard photos to a pointy-chinned guy. How? The man with the square chin on the right is Roscoe White, who possessed the 133-C picture. The square chin was a point of contention in the HSCA hearings, and HSCA expert Calvin McCamy tried to convince the HSCA panel that Oswald’s chin was square in earlier photographs. Congressman Fithian was unimpressed with McCamy’s attempts to give Oswald a square chin, and said:

“I did not visually at least identify any other chin that was even approximately as square as the one in the backyard photograph, from all of the pictures that you put up."

McCamy told the HSCA panel that Oswald’s square chin was an illusion, and that a trick of the light, as it was coming almost directly from above, hid his pointy chin. He was not able to provide even one photo of Oswald to persuasively support his point.

McCamy’s performance on the square chin issue was dubious. What was convincing, however, was the HSCA experts’ “Penrose” study, although it was not convincing in the way that it should have been. The Penrose study compared several photos of Oswald to the backyard photographs, to determine if the man in the backyard was indeed Oswald. The Penrose method measured and compared the dimensions of Oswald’s face to various alleged photographs of him. The Penrose study concluded that the backyard photographs were genuine depictions of Oswald. The data presented for the Penrose study tells the full tale. For three critical parts of Oswald’s head in the backyard photos, the committee omitted the data. Most importantly, they omitted the data regarding Oswald’s chin. That is extremely suspicious, as the chin was the primary area of contention. At best, such “editing” of the data invalidates the Penrose study. At worst, it brings up the suspicion of fraud.

Lying by omission is by far the most common method of lying. I am a professional in the creation, manipulation, and presentation of numerical data. The HSCA experts appeared to have eliminated the data that did not conform to their foregone conclusion. In science, such a method is known as “rigging the data.” In the world of accounting, it is known as "cooking the books" (as with Enron and friends). Of all the many criticisms I have seen of Jack White’s work over the years, by all manner of conspiracy debunkers, I have never seen one “lone gunman” theorist deal with that issue, in which the HSCA did something that seemed fraudulent.

Also in the images above, note the difference between where the neck, head, and bottom of the right ear meet. The man in the backyard apparently had a larger neck than the man who died in Dallas PD custody (as did Roscoe White).

In 133-A, a line can be seen exactly where a forger might have pasted Oswald’s face onto somebody else’s body. The below image shows approximately where the line is.

How did McCamy explain the apparent crop line? He said that it was a water spot. Michael Griffith has yet to meet a photographic expert who has seen water spots run in a straight line. Spots are just that: spots. They are circular in nature. Mee said during the Griffith interview:

“One thing is the sheer coincidence that this line just happens to fall in the chin area; that this one edge of this one particular water spot is supposed to have left deposits in such a way as to form a line that coincidentally starts at one side of the neck, crosses the chin, and then ends at the other side - right where Oswald's head could have been attached to the body. I mean, this would be a good place to join a head to a body in a composite, in the chin area, and here we have a line in that region, and it's supposed to be a water spot.”

What are the odds that perhaps the only water spot that ever ran in a straight line happened to occur right where one would expect a crop line that forged a chin (that was obviously not Oswald’s) onto his face? That kind of stretching of coincidence is typical of defenders of the official version. Conversely, they promote weak arguments to throw doubt on the sinister interpretation of the evidence, so that the official version seems at least mildly plausible. I have seen similar argumentation in scientific disputes. One regards the extinction of the world's megafauna, in which human agency is almost entirely responsible, while human-agency "skeptics" constantly concoct analyses that deflect the responsibility from humans onto the weather, in what seem to be somewhat fraudulent arguments. Similarly, the original Global Warming "debate" was almost entirely concocted by scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, and the compliant media portrayed those corporately-funded "dissidents" as having views as legitimate as those of nearly every genuine climate scientist on Earth.

The other anomaly that is extremely difficult to explain away, and Jack White is probably on the right track with his work, is that the backyard photos were all taken with the camera in virtually the same position. Marina Oswald was one of history’s most fickle witnesses, repeatedly prodded to give testimony about the backyard photos, and had to keep amending it, as more photos cropped up or other evidence contradicted it. The authorities manipulated her shamelessly. Many years after the assassination, she publicly stated that she believed that her husband had been framed. However, Marina had virtually no experience with taking pictures, and when she described how she took the backyard photos, it is reasonable to accept her account. According to Marina, Lee brought her into their backyard, and had her take the pictures. He advanced the film and had her take a picture. Then he walked over, took the camera from her, advanced the film and handed her the camera back. Then she took another picture, until all four photos had been taken.

The background in the backyard photos is virtually unchanged from image to image. In order for that to be the case, Marina probably could not have even moved her feet or changed where she held the camera. That is a highly unlikely scenario, given how Marina said that the photo session was performed. The HSCA experts said there were minor differences in the camera’s perspective that could account for the camera moving between pictures. However, the apparent differences in perspective were so small that they almost certainly had to have been done on a tripod. Jack White performed experiments with “keystoning,” in which the photo was slightly tilted and then photographed, which appeared to cause the slight variations. White reported that he was able to exactly align the backgrounds by that technique. I would not accept White’s findings until I saw them independently reproduced, but Mee said the concept can easily explain the slight variances, particularly if they are the result of multigenerational copying. In copying 133-A from one generation to another, the slightest change in the planar alignment of the copying camera and photo can produce the differences that can be seen in the backgrounds between 133-A, B, and C. I would like to see some quality independent analysis of such a hypothesis before completely endorsing it, but at this time, I have to lean toward the tripod method of taking the images, with slight background differences due to slight planar and lateral differences in making the multigenerational copies.

By examining the 133-A and 133-B photographs above, it is evident that in 133-A, Oswald’s head is virtually perpendicular to the ground. In 133-B, Oswald’s head is significantly tilted to his left. In both images, the shadow below his nose falls almost exactly at the midpoint of his upper lips (see the chin close-up above to see where that shadow hits his lips). Because of the tilt of his head in 133-B, the nose shadow should not have hit his lip in the same place. McCamy produced photographs of a mannequin at the HSCA hearings to explain this discrepancy. He provided a novel explanation in which the head twisted and tilted, to keep the shadow hitting the same spot on his lip. The HSCA panel was skeptical of McCamy’s explanation, and when the mannequin achieved the posture where the shadow hit the same part of the lip, it was no longer looking at the camera. Once again, McCamy invoked a fortuitous set of improbable circumstances to explain away an anomaly that suggested photographic fakery. Because the mannequin no longer looked into the camera when the desired shadow was achieved, such an analysis cannot be accepted as explaining the anomaly. What appears more likely is that the same head was pasted onto the different pictures, but the forgery was not sophisticated enough to account for different head angles. Also strongly supporting the pasted-head hypothesis, the head is the same size in the photos, although the body size changes. Also, in comparing 133-A and 133-C, the only part of the photos that are identical are Oswald's head. How are those anomalies even possible if the photographs are genuine?

One area of evidence deals with photogrammetrics, and Jack White made the case that the shadows on his body did not fall in the same line as the shadows on his face, for further evidence of fakery. The HSCA investigators performed a sophisticated analysis where they drew lines from the places on Oswald’s body that cast the shadow to where the shadow hit the ground. They performed what they called a “vanishing point” analysis in which the lines all converged on the source of light, the Sun. The HSCA panel was also skeptical of the vanishing point analysis, as the lines appeared to converge only slight past Oswald’s head, not at the distant Sun. In 2009, a college professor, Hany Farid, who is now known to work for the FBI, produced an analysis of the lighting below Oswald's chin and the shadow cast behind his body in 133-A, and determined that they came from the same light source, so he concluded that the backyard photographs were genuine. Case closed. His analysis was predictably ballyhooed by the media, but no serious investigator considered it anything more than another publicity stunt by the apologists, and in that instance by an admitted asset of the FBI. That kind of "analysis" makes the conspiracy suspicions even stronger, not allay them.

The apparent falling off to the right of Oswald’s body shadow in 133-A is partly an illusion caused by his bizarre posture. White thinks that Oswald is standing to the right of his center of gravity, which should not be possible. However, still photos catch people who are never quite still, and "Oswald" could have been shifting his weight as the photo was taken, producing the effect. All of Jack White’s attempts to impute measured distances onto parts of the picture were dismissed by the HSCA (and many of Jack’s critics) because of his limitations as a photogrammetric analyst. Has anybody pursued what Jack attempted, to reproduce the scene and use sophisticated photogrammetric analysis, to determine what the real height of the man in the photos was, or how long his rifle was? If anybody has done it, I have not heard of it.

I think that the evidence is persuasive, however, that from the chin up it is Oswald, and from the chin down it is somebody else. Whose chin might that be? Jack White investigated the Roscoe White connection. Roscoe White was on the same ship to Japan as Oswald during their Marine days. They both may have worked for military intelligence. White began at the Dallas Police Department not long before the JFK assassination. A generation after Roscoe White’s death, his son claimed to find his father’s diary in which Roscoe admitted that he was one of the Dealey Plaza shooters. Soon after the son publicly announced the existence of his father’s diary, he said that his home was burglarized and the diary was taken. The conspiracy debunkers mainly replied with “how convenient,” and have largely dismissed the son’s testimony. However, the 133-C photo had been taken from White’s widow in a robbery (other accounts say that con men obtained them from White’s widow), and was seized by the FBI. That was how it made its way into the evidence.[41]

There are other correspondences between Roscoe White and the figure in the backyard photos. He had a similar posture to the “Oswald” in the backyard photos.

The 133-A de Mohrenschildt photo is difficult to account for. It is a clearer image than the “original” 133-A and views area outside the frame of the original 133-A. Brian Mee thought this suspicious, as do I. If the photos were forged as Mee thought they were, the de Mohrenschildt photo perfectly fits the evidence. If the backyard photos are fakes, the likeliest way to do it was to take the original photos with the highest resolution cameras possible and then perform the forgery work. Then the forged images would be photographed at least once more, as removing the images from their original generation would hide much of the evidence of forgery. The photographs will also lose their resolution in successive generations and become grainier. Also, in successive generations, the image will often get slightly cropped along the way. The lower resolution and the graininess of the backyard photos (as Mee observed), as well as the cropping between the de Mohrenschildt photo and the “original” 133-A, gives compelling evidence that the “original” 133-A is a generation or more after the de Mohrenschildt image. One would not expect for Oswald to do that, but fits impressively with the notion that the forgers made a slight mistake when planting evidence in de Mohrenschildt’s belongings.

In addition, the notion that the “original” 133-A is a later generation of the forged images makes some of the HSCA testing of dubious validity. The HSCA investigators performed tests such as measuring the depth of the negative and grain analysis, which would have been of questionable validity if they were generations removed from the original, altered photos.

Those are the main lines of evidence I was the most impressed with, as far as giving evidence of forgery, and where I thought the HSCA performed questionable, if not fraudulent, work.

The last area of evidence that I found compelling, but other investigators often have not, is in the area of his hands, arms, and the newspapers and rifle he is holding. Those backyard photos about are the only evidence linking Oswald to the murder weapon. A nitrate test on his cheek on the day of the assassination (to determine if he fired the rifle) was negative. There was a belated finding of his palm print on an inside part of the rifle, after it had been dismantled, which has understandably been greeted with skepticism in the JFK “conspiracy” community. There were no fingerprints on either the rifle or the pistol that were identified as Oswald’s murder weapons.

Oswald had to be an idiot if he was the real assassin. With all of those incriminating circumstances that “framed” Oswald, we are supposed to believe that he carefully wiped his fingerprints off the rifle before he snuck out of the depository? But he also was so stupid that he had no plan of escape and took a bus and cab before lamely trying to hide in a theater? Far more likely is that the “safe house” plan that Hunt devised for Oswald evaporated when JFK was really shot, and Oswald did what he could, on his own, as the world’s most wanted man.

The rest of this backyard photo section will deal with the rifle, newspapers, and the hands and arms holding them.

Oswald’s left arm, which holds the rifle, is peculiar. Below his upper arm, the only thing visible is his hand. His entire forearm and elbow are invisible. Jack White tried reproducing the phenomenon, but was unable to.

It may be possible that the way Oswald held the rifle hid his entire forearm, but that anomaly bears further scrutiny. His right hand that holds the newspapers is anomalous for more than one reason, and one anomaly is impressive indeed. The fingers on his right hand all appear chopped off, as if Oswald had an accident with the meat cleaver.

The photograph I am using is a pretty good one, from Groden’s The Killing of a President, p. 112, and I have gleaned some other versions from the Internet during my previous update process in 2014. The chopped-off look is evident in the photo above. Whatever disparaging comments the critics may make about Jack White, one thing they cannot dispute is that Jack had the best quality photogra