Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 1/1978 Ronald Reagan gave a misinformed history of Vietnam on his radio program that "There were two Vietnams, north and south. They had been separate nations for centuries. Both became colonial possessions of France…and both were freed a few years after World War II...Vietnam returned to its pre-colonial status as two nations...The Communist dictator of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, refused to hold the elections and when a million of his people started moving south away from communism...his troops barricaded the frontier and halted the migration."
  
• Jan-Feb 1978 issue of Civil Liberties Review had a scathing review of Mark Lane's Code Name Zorro by Frank Donner called "Why Isn't the Truth Bad Enough?" He complained that too many Americans couldn't accept that deranged individuals were behind assassinations.
  
• THE SABOTAGING OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY by L. Fletcher Prouty - January, 1978 issue of Gallery.
  
• 1/3/1978 Former CIA deputy director Ray Cline was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that the US media were the "only unfettered espionage agencies in this country," meaning that reporters had easier access to intelligence than the CIA did.
  
• 1/4/1978 Jack Anderson revealed that the CIA had recruited "Mafia hit men" for "international murder missions." Anderson reports in his Washington Post column that the CIA has recruited "Mafia hit men" for "international murder missions." The agency, Anderson asserts, has sought to "create its own branch of Murder, Inc.' -- a killer squad that would assassinate undesirable foreign leaders for $1 million each."
  
• 1/6/1978 The Crown of St. Stephen, prime symbol of the Hungarian nation, is returned to Hungary by the U.S. (taken custody in July 1945 at the end of World War II).
  
• 1/10/1978 Pedro Chamorro, Nicaraguan opposition newspaper editor and publisher, was murdered.
  
• 1/11/1978 Carlos Marcello, in a secret executive session, appears as a witness before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He is called as a witness, not as a suspect. His sworn testimony is given under grant of immunity.
  
• 1/13/1978 Former senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey dies.
  
• 2/1978 Usually given credit for escalating the Roswell incident prominently back into the public eye is a nuclear physicist and UFO lecturer named Stanton Friedman who just happened to be lecturing on UFOs in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in February 1978. Before the lecture a television station manager told him about a man he knew through ham radio contact named Jesse A. Marcel who, according to the station manager, had actually handled wreckage from the crashed object. Intrigued, the very next day Friedman called Marcel, who lived not far away in Houma, Louisiana. Marcel was unable to recall the specific dates and times accurately so Friedman let it go at at that. A year later a man by the name of William L. Moore found clippings of the incident and, somehow comparing notes with Friedman, discovered that the story Marcel told actually paralleled the events. After intensive research and interviews Moore and a man named Charles Berlitz along with Friedman, albeit uncredited, teamed up to write the first book specifically on the subject, titled The Roswell Incident (1980), followed then by an opened floodgate of similar Roswell related tomes. Pappy Henderson confides in his close friend John Kromschroeder that he flew wreckage from a crashed saucer out of Roswell and to Dayton, Ohio. He shows Kromschroeder a fragment of the debris and tells his friend that he saw alien bodies. Jesse Marcel is interviewed by a number of researchers, including Leonard H. Stringfield and Stanton Friedman. Marcel tells them that he is sure the wreckage is nothing from earth. Later, Marcel grants interviews to various news organizations, but those reports do not gain wide dissemination. Friedman shared this information with William Moore, who joined forces with Charles Berlitz, the then "red hot" author of the Bermuda Triangle. The fame of the Roswell Incident, in which an apparent extra-terrestrial spacecraft had crashed, with the event subsequently officially denied and covered up by the US government, had just been born. Since then, the Roswell Incident has become one of the major pillars of the Contact Scenario, and has grown to include elaborate tales of recovered bodies and even, in some accounts, a live alien. None of these elements were part of the 1947 story, which spoke only of wreckage. All later additions to the original account can be shown to originate from the late 1970s onwards, some 30 years after the incident.
  
• 2/2/1978 Learyites leery of Carter's encounter No one recalls 1970 UFO spotting by Tom Tiede (Newspaper Enterprise Association) Mt. Pleasant (Texas) Daily Tribune, Feb. 2, 1978 Leary, Ga (NEA) - Jimmy Carter had a close encounter of a highly suspicious kind here in 1970. He was a political hopeful then, making a speech at the local Lions Club, and he says he spotted an unidentified flying object 30 degrees above the horizon. He also says 10 to 12 others saw it with him. As it happens, however, there is no one in Leary who remembers sighting a UFO in company with the future president. Carter insists that the object's brightness attracted a crowd, but it appears it only attracted him. Not one resident recalls anything unusual about that particular January evening. The townsfolk are mildly amused by the inconsistency of the matter. They have in fact been chuckling ever since last year when the media carried belated news of the Carter encounter. Some think that Carter actually viewed the town's silver water tower; from a distance it can look a bit odd. But whatever Carter saw, he apparently saw it alone. Mayor Stanley Shepard says he has talked with everyone who might have attended the Lions Club meeting on the night in question, "and nobody remembers anything about flying saucers." People recall that Carter's speech was dull - but as for spaceships, no....
  
• 2/3/1978 Frank Sturgis was deposed for the Hunt v. Third Press trial; he testified that while working for Castro, "I was recruited by the station, CIA station chief in Santiago de Cuba, to spy for the United States government." He also said he was involved in CIA plots to kill Castro as well as attempts to overthrow the governments of Guatemala and Panama. He took a leadership role in Operation 40 and "was approached by an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency to do a domestic assassination." (Plausible Denial 3)
  
• 2/8/1978 Release of the film Ruby and Oswald,' directed by Mel Stuart. Michael Lerner plays Jack Ruby and Frederic Forrest plays Oswald. Filmed mostly on location in Dallas. Dallas detective James Leavelle plays himself (handcuffed to LHO while being shot). The film mostly follows the Warren Commission line, though the assassination sequence is curiously ambiguous. Only an empty sixth floor window is shown, along with the stack of cartoons on the sixth floor, and then a shot of the Moorman Polaroid. Oswald is next seen standing in the second floor lunchroom. A pre-assassination scene has been entirely invented: Ruby throwing a patron out of his club for joking about the Kennedys.China announced the end of a 10-year ban on numerous classical and modern Western writers.
  
• 2/17/1978 The US Government formally asked Chile for information about Juan Williams Rose and Alejandro Romeral Jara, and said they were suspects in the Letelier bombing. The Chilean government denied everything.
  
• 2/19/1978 Amidst growing pressure in the United States to investigate Jim Jones, on February 19, 1978, Harvey Milk of San Francisco wrote a letter of support for the Peoples Temple to President Jimmy Carter. Therein, Milk wrote that Jones was known "as a man of the highest character." Regarding the leader of those attempting to extricate relatives from Jonestown, Milk wrote he was "attempting to damage Rev. Jones reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies."
  
• 3/1978 Astronaut Gordon Cooper addressed a UN committee on somebody else's space vehicles: aliens from space were flying to Earth on exploration voyages of their own. The ex-astronaut declared that since it was a planet-wide problem it demanded international attention. The United Nations maintained a stoic, even embarrassed silence, nonetheless. Part of Cooper's problem might have been that he was visiting under the auspices of the then ruler of Grenada, the madcap "Sir" Eric Gairy. Gairy's excesses and crackpottery, added to his alleged corruption and brutality at home, later led to the New Jewel coup-d'etat led by Maurice Bishop, and indirectly to the US intervention five years later.
  
• 3/1/1978 Alexander Haig endorsed the neutron bomb in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
  
• 3/2/1978 The House Select Committee on Assassinations officially asks the CIA to check all its files and index references for a Maurice Bishop. (Fonzi)
  
• 3/6/1978 Aldo Moro, former prime minister of Italy, was kidnapped for political ransom. The abductors, the Red Brigade, murdered him about two months later and his body was found in Rome on May 9, 1978. Thirty-three members of the Red Brigade were sent to prison. Later investigators have concluded that the Red Brigades were infilitrated and run by right-wing members of the security services and organized crime, and that Moro was killed because he wanted to bring the Italian Communist Party into the government in a grand coalition.
  
• 3/11/1978 John Ebersole, MD was the attending radiologist at JFK's autopsy. During his suppressed HSCA testimony (released in the 1990s) the doctor said, "The back of the head was missing... ." After he was shown the autopsy photograph with the back of the scalp intact, Ebersole commented, "You know, my recollection is more of a gaping occipital wound than this, but I can certainly not state that this is the way it looked. Again we are relying on a 15 year old recollection. But had you asked me without seeing these or seeing the pictures, you know, I would have put the wound here rather than more forward." Yet Ebersole claimed that "I had the opportunity" (to examine the back of JFK's head, while positioning the head for X-rays). Later Ebersole admitted, "...perhaps about 12:30 (AM) a large fragment of the occipital bone was received from Dallas and at Dr. Finck's request I X-rayed these (sic)... ." If it was an occipital bone fragment that arrived, the defect must indeed have been posterior. The occipital bone is at the base of the rear of the skull. Also from the HSCA's suppressed records:· Autopsy photographer John Stringer: "remembers taking 'at least two exposures of the body cavity." James H. Humes, MD, "...specifically recall(ed photographs) ... were taken of the President's chest ... (these photographs) do not exist." J. Thornton Boswell, MD: "...he (Boswell) thought they photographed ...the exposed thoracic cavity and lung...' but doesn't remember ever seeing those photographs." Robert F. Karnei, MD, (a pathologist who, though not a formal member of the autopsy team, lent a hand with JFK's autopsy: "He (Karnei) recalls them putting the probe in and taking pictures (the body was on the side at the time) (sic)." Assistant autopsy photographer, Floyd Reibe: "[H]e thought he took about six pictures I think it was three film packs' - of internal portions of the body."
  
• 3/16/1978 March 16 and April 18 US Senate approved the Panama Canal treaties.
  
• 3/18/1978 US embassy in Chile reported that the government was ready to turn over Alejandro Romeral and Juan Williams to the US. Investigators expected to meet Townley and Armando Fernandez, but instead met army captains Rene Riveros and Rolando Mosqueira, who had made the trip in August 1976 using Townley and Fernandez' aliases. These two men were not involved in the Letelier assassination, but had been sent to the US to provide an innocent explanation for the visa incident with the US embassy in Paraguay. (Assassination on Embassy Row)
  
• 3/19/1978 Dallas Morning News reported that US Army intelligence had a file on Oswald before the assassination; a colonel in intelligence was supplying the FBI with information on him within an hour of his arrest. The HSCA learned that these records had been destroyed. (memo attached to FBI document 105-82555; R 221)
  
• 3/21/1978 Haig praised the neutron bomb for "its usablity, its credibility...a system more discriminating."
  
• 3/22/1978 James B. Wileott's Testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Former CIA finance officer Jim Wilcott confirmed the implications of Ann Egerter's deposition. In his own HSCA testimony, Wilcott said Oswald served the CIA specifically as a double agent in the Soviet Union who afterwards came under suspicion by the Agency. Jim Wilcott's straightforward testimony on Oswald was made possible by his and his wife's courageous decision to divorce themselves from the CIA and speak the truth. After nine years working for the CIA as a husband-and wife team, Jim and Elsie Wilcott resigned from the Agency in 1966. "My wife and I both left the CIA, " Wilcott testified before the House Select Committee, " because we became convinced that what CIA was doing couldn't be reconciled to basic principles of democracy or basic principles of humanism."
  
• 3/27/1978 Chief Kapuuo, who was appointed president of Namibia by South African officials, was killed.
  
• 3/31/1978 The CIA informs the HSCA that its Office of the Inspector General, its Office of the General Counsel, its Office of Personnel and the Deputy Directorate of Operations have no records of a Maurice Bishop - and that a search of David Atlee Phillip's files does not indicate he had ever registered the alias of Maurice Bishop.
  
• 3/31/1978 Preliminary HSCA Interview of Ann Egerter by Dan Hardway and Betsy Wolf