Silencers, Sniper Rifles and the CIA

[Peter Lemkin]

A little bio....

Mitchell WerBell, the son of a former Czarist calvary officer, was born inPhiladelphia in 1918.
During the Second World War Werbell joined the Office of Strategic Services(OSS) and saw action in Burma and China. According to Gaeton Fonzi, this enabled WerBell to join "the superspy fraternity" that included Allen W. Dulles, William Casey, Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt.
After the war, WerBell lived outside of Atlanta. He also worked as an arms dealer. WerBell ran a series of weapon manufacturing and marketing firms including Military Armament Corporation, Defense Services and Quantum Ordnance Bankers. WerBell distributed advanced weaponry to selective foreign groups.
In 1959 WerBell did covert work for Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. During this period be became friends with Gerry P. Hemming, Bernardo De Torres and Gordon Novel. Hemming and Torres were both representatives of WerBell in his arms sales business. WerBell was also rumoured to be involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Roy Hargraves told Noel Twyman that WerBell supplied silencers used by the gunmen in Dallas. Another source said that WerBell was involved with Jack Ruby.
WerBell was interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi while carrying out research for his book, The Last Investigation(1993): "There's a helluva lot I ain't said yet, and there's a helluva lot I ain't gonna say yet... I've been in so many places, so many countries, so many revolutions, it's beginning to get all mixed up in my mind... We don't play with people like that (Jack Ruby). I mean, it's as simple as that. This guy Ruby, he called, I didn't know who the hell he was, but that was years ago."
WerBell also did covert work in the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. In 1966 WerBell served as adviser on Project Nassau, a planned invasion of Haiti by Cuban and Haitian exiles to oust the dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.
In 1967 WerBell formed a partnership with Gordon Ingram. Together they distributed the Ingram M-11, a hand-held, quiet machine gun. Six years later WerBell and his arms company, Defense Services, were indicted for allegedly trying to sell some of these Ingram submachine guns to a federal undercover agent. He was also indicted for proposing to sell 2,000 of these weapons to Robert Vesco in Costa Rica. Later, both these charges were dropped.
Mitchell Livingston WerBell III died of cancer in 1983.

::trenchcoatspy::

When you're doing a military crossfire assassination of your own President, you hire the very best assassin-marksmen, and use the very best rifles/pistols possible! With men like WerBel supplying silencers, you can make any of the shots be disguised almost completely, or to the direction they came from. He even knew how to make a shot sound like it came from another direction. I think all of the stories of second-rate marksmen being used just because they 'hated' JFK are myth. This was a professional hit [and silent coup d'etat] done by military and intelligence professionals. They used the best of the best, and scripted it look like it was the work of an 'amateur' with a third-rate WWI/II rifle. If you buy that bull, you'll buy anything.