Detailed discussion and analysis of the H&L evidence

[Richard Booth]

I was browsing the Weisberg archive at hood.edu, reading Harold Weisberg's manuscript "Inside the Assassination Industry."

That manuscript, for those who haven't seen it, is sort of a biographical work and an exercise in bashing all of the critics. It has some good information in it. (and some bad.)

As with all Harold Weisberg works ...the book features awful prose that may require cryptology skills to decipher what the hell Harold is trying to say. I must note that I appreciate some of Weisberg's real research, but am not a fan of his written works. I also find some of the bashing in the book to be too aggressive and even unwarranted. I wondered if Weisberg had made up entirely a section where he recounts Jim Garrison writing a speech wherein Garrison steals a line from one of Weisberg's books, which includes the word 'fagots', which allegedly made Jim Garrison laugh uncontrollably. I find that entire passage very hard to believe. Weisberg makes the claim in this manuscript that (1) Garrison's entire investigation was based on Weisberg's books and (2) Jim Garrison's entire investigation was unfounded. (Prompting me to wonder "Which is it, did he crib everything from you or was it unfounded, or both and your own work is unfounded??")

Ironically, in the passage about Garrison, Weisberg writes "Aside from not being able to speak it without breaking up, he had not phrased it well." Weisberg has no place stating someone didn't phrase something well given his convoluted and ridiculously laborious prose.

Anyhow. As it relates to H&L, the work has some good stuff in it on LEE Oswald (and HARVEY Oswald) that meshes with John's work.

See [CH17 - The Not So Jolly Green Giant]. Some lengthy excerpts below:

[..]
Exchange Alley was a narrow street before French Quarter rebuilding eliminated it. It ran parallel with Decatur and was next to it. The Oswalds and Mildred "Mom" Sawyer both lived at 126, on the same floor, the second floor. Mrs. Sawyer's son had the apartment between them. Mrs. Sawyer is my source on this. She operated the then nearby "Society Page" bar. She called it a "cocktail lounge.
[..]
The morning I interviewed her I also interviewed the bartender then on duty, Johnny Kormundi (phonetic). Both remember Oswald as a boy clearly. Both remember that as a kid he was frequently around that homosexual bar and both told me that he had nothing to do with the bar's homosexual patrons. It was well known as a homosexual bar.
[..]
Both also told me what tended to confirm the dependability of the man who spoke to me on that Oakland talk show. They both said that as a child Oswald loved to shoot pool and that he was a kid "pool shark." You will not find this in the Commission's "biography" of him in its Report's 68-page "Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald" (pages 669-737) or elsewhere in its Report.
[..]
I had not only shared with Garrison what I learned from that man, who requested anonymity. I included it in Oswald in New Orleans. Garrison was well familiar with it beginning with his reading of it before it was published so he could write the Foreword the publisher had asked of him.
His foreword is short and it is eloquent, as he could be and often was. It is replete with allegations that the government had not investigated the JFK assassination and that it had covered the assassination up a la Orwell, who he quotes in it. He refers to the government in Orwell's term as The Ministry of Truth. And he said that the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, as he had over and over again.
He wrote,
"Above all it has been decided that you are not to know of Lee Harvey Oswald's relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. Nor or you to know that a number of the men actually involved in the assassinations had been employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. You are not to know of these matters because of something called 'national security.'" (pages 12-3)

Yet with all he attributed to the CIA and "national security" he had no interest in Oswald, who as a Marine of lowly rank, held both TOP SECRET and CRYPTO clearances!
This I had told him and have in Oswald in New Orleans (pages 85-94).
Or in the fact that Oswald's Marine records do not include his having these very high security clearances, at least as those records that were disclosed after he had been officially anointed the Presidential assassin.
Just before one o'clock in the morning of December 16, 1966, when I was in California promoting my second book and on the popular talk show of Joe Dolan, a Harvard lawyer who then broadcast on KNEW, in Oakland, a listener phoned to talk to me. He waited until the show signed off at one and then talked for an hour and a half.
This man was deeply troubled and there was no question about it. He had, as he said, served with Oswald. Otherwise he could not have known what was not known about Oswald and I later did check out and confirm. Such as his liking for classical music, that he was a "pool shark," the kind of person he was and even those clearances.
Some of the Oswald clearance information was known to and ignored by the Commission. The commissioned officer under whom Oswald worked and several of the Marines who were in his unit, a few engaged in the same work with him, testified that Oswald had had "at least" SECRET clearance. When in hopeful anticipation of getting evidence that Oswald had killed a fellow Marine the Commission looked into that, it got from the Navy what I later got from it. These records hold the official proofs of Oswald high TOP SECRET and CRYPTO clearances. These are not Oswald's records. The navy responded to my FOIA request by telling me it had no Oswald records. We come to that soon. But as of this writing, although I told other besides Garrison of it, it has not been published other than by me.
Oswald in New Orleans was published in 1967, more than 25 years ago. That alone justifies my quoting some of what it reported about this man, his information, what the Commission did know about and did do nothing about, including that counsel whose only client was truth, Liebeler:
"It was part confessional, part shame mixed with self-pity and self-derogation, part fear, and all worry. This man had been in the Marine Corps with Oswald. From his personal experience, he did not believe a single word about the Oswald of this period that became public with the Report. He had agonized in silence for three years between the issuance of the Report and our conversation because he knew things, he said, that had not been made public and were not in accord with what had been publicized- and he was certain what he knew was correct. [It had been only two years.]
"Following his military service, he had built a successful life, had a family, and was worried about the possible consequences of being associated with any account not in consonance with the official Oswald "line." He feared he or his business might be hurt or that his family might suffer. ...
"Briefly, it is his story that Oswald was bright, not a kook of any kind, not a blatant or proselytizing Marxist, and really a quiet, serious guy. They knew each other socially and engaged in certain recreational activities together. He never heard Oswald say anything about Communism, for or against, in all this time.
"More important is what he disclosed about Oswald's position in the Marine Corps. The unit in which both served, said my informant, was one of three similar ones of which one was always in Japan and the others in the United States. Their function was classified. Every man in the outfit carried security clearance. ...
"Of all the men in the outfit, five had special "top" security approvals. The entire complement carried a minimum of "confidential." ... Above this there were "secret," "top secret," and a special one, "crypto." Of all the man, only five were "crypto."
"One of these was Lee Harvey Oswald.
"'Can you possibly be wrong?' I asked him.
"He insisted not.
"'Could your memory be playing tricks?'
"No, he was positive. He went farther when I questioned him about "crypto," which he indicated was "black box" stuff. ...
"If correct, this is more than in disagreement with the entire official story of Oswald, his relations with the government and the assassination. It is an assault on the integrity of many of the members of the staff of the Commission and of the investigative agencies. It raises questions about the transcripts of Oswald's official Marine Corps records. In every way he could, this man insisted he was not in error, that he knew.
"And he went into more detail. Correctly stating that Oswald got a "hardship" discharge so he could care for an allegedly destitute mother (it was common knowledge among his mates that Oswald had said he planned to go to Switzerland for study instead), the mysterious caller specified that Oswald spent his last two or three weeks in the service "with CID." It is, obviously, not a requirement of a "hardship" discharge that the enlisted man stay with military intelligence.
"Immediately my mind flashed back to my first book on this subject, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, where I had exposed certain unorthodox aspects of Oswald's discharge (pages 123-4) that are here appropriate. That section reads:
"With but 43 days of his Marine Corps enlistment remaining, or three months if the penalties of the courts martial had been imposed (19H725), Oswald received a "hardship discharge" (19H676). This was a clear fraud about which neither the Marine Corps nor any other government agency ever did anything. Why? ...
"Of Oswald's personal activity in the Marines, the Report states: 'He studied the Russian language, read a Russian-language newspaper and seemed interested in what was going on in the Soviet Union.' ... But his clearance to handle classified information was not revoked. It was granted May 3, 1957, 'after careful checks.' Upon discharge he signed a form acknowledging he had been informed about penalties for revelation of classified information. This included awareness 'that certain categories of Reserve and Retired personnel ... can be recalled to duty ... for trial by court-martial for unlawful disclosure of information ...' (19H680). When Oswald defected and appeared in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he declared his intention to tell the Russians all he knew, and he knew about the radar installations in which he served and of codes (R262, 265, 393). The Report is barren on the subject, but there have been accounts published of the necessity for changing codes after his defection.
"Yet on his return to the United States, Oswald was not kept under regular surveillance (R439), was not charged with breach of security, and was not even confronted with the fraudulent nature of his hardship discharge. Explanations of lack of proof might be offered, no matter how unacceptably, for the failure to charge him with breach of security. But the failure to keep him under surveillance or to do anything about his fraudulent discharge are not susceptible to such facile pleadings. And the Report is incomplete on even this unsatisfactory explanation. It reads, 'No evidence has been found that they used him for any particular propaganda or other political or informational purposes' (R393). There is no reference here to military or security information. ["They" here refers to the Soviets.]
"The hardship discharge was to enable Oswald to care for his mother. He made not even a gesture in this direction and the Marine Corps would appear to have been aware that he had no such intention. The effective date of his discharge was September 11, 1959 (19H680; 22H79). On September 4, 1959, he applied for a passport from Santa Anna, California. It was issued September 10, 1959. Accompanying this application was a Marine Corps certification that had to be filed with the passport application and submission of which is noted on the application. 'This is to certify,' it read, 'that PFC (E-2) Lee Harvey Oswald, 1653230, U.S. Marine Corps is scheduled to be released from Active Duty and transferred to the Marine Corps Reserve (Inactive) on 11 September 1959.' ...
"The Marine Corps certification of Oswald's imminent discharge that accompanied his passport application at the very time it was processing a hardship discharge was not lost in the mass of the Commission's documentation. Nor is it suppressed in the Report. Instead, the Report ignores both this and the fraudulent nature of the discharge in the text and, in a 13-line section of Appendix XV in which the nature of this discharge is not referred to, notes that a statement that 'he was about to be discharged' accompanied the passport application (R746). Why did not the Marine Corps revoke Oswald's security clearance; why did it keep him in a classified job and cooperate in getting him a passport while it was discharging him so he could support his mother?
"This is the background of Oswald's now famous trip to the Soviet Union, where he arrived in mid-October 1959. ..."

When I was home I started reading Commission testimony I recalled. Kerry Thornley, who was in Oswald's outfit when he returned from the Far Eat and was at the Santa Anna base in Southern California, was questioned by Commission counsel Albert Jenner. Among other things Thornley confirmed what that caller-in had told me about security clearances. What is important to bear in mind is that those who did not have proper security clearances were denied access to classified areas that required those clearances. While awaiting discharge, as that caller-in had also told me, Oswald worked in an intelligence section:
[..]


You can read the rest here:

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%...r%2017.doc

The Garrison stuff is distasteful, and as I said I wonder if some of it is made-up. Specifically the allegation that Garrison spent the better part of 15 minutes uncontrollably laughing about the word 'fagots', present in a quote from Weisberg's book 'Photographic Whitewash' in which Weisberg claims Garrison cribbed material from---right in front of Weisberg's face no less, without apology. The entire 'scene' just seems 'off' and in fact like a scene from a movie. Weisberg's movie. Right down to Weisberg asking Jim "hey, do you have a copy of Photographic Whitewash?" and right then and there Jim pulls it conveniently right off the shelf behind him, hands it to Weisberg, and Weisberg turns to page 9 and shows Garrison the line he's cribbing for his own speech. (and laughing uncontrollably over)

Weisberg is equally dismissive of Mark Lane -- this book reminding me of Harrison Livingstone's 'Killing The Truth' in that it pisses all over everyone and elevates the author above the rest.