Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 9/1975 Ford refused to grant the House Select Committee on Intelligence access to classified material until it yielded any right to make the information public. The House agreed. (Profiles of an Era p212)
  
• 9/1975 "AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ASSASSINATION BUSINESS" by L. Fletcher Prouty in this month's Gallery magazine.
  
• 9/1/1975 The FBI confirmed the story about agent Hosty. (NY Times)
  
• 9/1-5/1975 The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their 30th annual joint meeting in Washington.
  
• 9/2/1975 (UPI) The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Dallas police covered up until spring, 1964, a conversation indicating that the bureau had known that Lee Harvey Oswald was a threat to President Kennedy, The Houston Chronicle reported today. The newspaper also reported that the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of the President on Nov. 22, 1963, did not fully check into the alleged conversation when the commission learned of it in May, 1963. J. E. Curry, the Dallas Police Chief at the time, informed Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren of the FBI's reported prior knowledge in a registered letter. The Chronicle printed a copy in today's edition. Chief Curry, who retired in 1964, wrote: "On that date (Nov. 22), before newsmen, I stated that I had received information that the FBI knew Oswald's presence in Dallas and that the Dallas Police Department had no information on Oswald in its files. This statement was based on the report of Lieutenant (Jack) Revill." Three hours after President Kennedy was killed, Lieut. Revill said he encountered an FBI agent, James Hosty, in the basement of the Dallas City Hall. Mr. Hosty told him the bureau had known that Oswald could be a threat to the President, Mr. Revill said in a statement. He eventually repeated his assertion to the Warren Commission, which was headed by Chief Justice Warren.
  
• 9/4/1975 Larry O'Brien was quoted as saying that he felt that he was the prime target of the Watergate break-in, and that Nixon wanted to dig up some dirt on him. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 9/4/1975 Israel and Egypt sign a US-mediated interim agreement on Sinai withdrawal. Egypt was provided with a buffer zone east of the Suez Canal.
  
• 9/5/1975 As President Ford nears the state Capitol in Sacramento a woman points a pistol at him. She is identified as Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme, 26, a follower of Charles Manson. Not long before Ford's visit, Squeaky Fromme has gone to the offices of the Sacramento Bee and asked them to print a letter from Manson saying that if Gerald Ford continued to violate the law, there would be a massacre. The newspaper gave it to the police, who shared it with the Secret Service. Nothing happened. The Secret Service has not interviewed Fromme. When Ford comes to town, she puts on a flaming red robe and comes up to within two feet of Ford and shoots. ("The Woman in Red - An Earlier Threat" Keith Powers, San Francisco Chronicle, 9/6/1975) But the pistol's loading mechanism had not been operated properly, and none of the four live rounds had been loaded into the chamber. She was wrestled to the ground by SS agent Larry Buendorf as she repeatedly screamed, "It didn't go off!" She was sent to prison. Other sources say that an SS agent blocked the hammer from striking the bullet with his finger. She said, "This country is in a mess. This man is not your president. I wasn't going to shoot him. I just wanted to get some attention for Charlie and the girls."
  
• 9/6/1975 Czech tennis star Martina Navratilova, in New York for the US Open, requests political asylum.
  
• 9/6/1975 David Belin claims he wrote CIA Director William Colby, asking him that all JFK-related CIA documents be released, but he got very little response (Final Disclosure p174-176).
  
• 9/8/1975 Shocked by revelations that Allen Dulles did not tell the Warren Commission about plots to kill Castro, Senator Richard Schweiker conducts a personal preliminary review of the Kennedy assassination and concludes that "the fingerprints of intelligence" were all over Oswald's activities. He convinces Committee Chairman Frank Church to establish a subcommittee to review the role of federal agencies in investigating the JFK case.
  
• 9/9/1975 After submitting informal requests for information, the Pike Committee formally requested "all CIA estimates, current intelligence reports and summaries, situation reports, and other pertinent documents" that related to the IC's ability to predict "the 1973 Mideast war; the 1974 Cyprus crisis; the 1974 coup in Portugal; the 1974 nuclear explosion by India; the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam; the 1972 declarations of martial law in the Philippines and Korea; and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia." The committee, of course, wanted all of this by the next morning. The request outraged Agency officials.
  
• 9/9/1975 NY state legislature passed a $2.3 billion aid bill to save NYC from financial collapse.
  
• 9/10/1975 Senate overrides Ford's veto of a $7.9 billion education spending bill.
  
• 9/11/1975 Ford began wearing a bullet-proof vest to campaign in his first public appearance since the assassination attempt.
  
• 9/11/1975 House Select Committee hearings on the 1973 Middle East War began on 11 September. They almost immediately degenerated into open warfare with the executive branch. Pike, a firm believer that the classification system was strictly that of the executive branch and that his committee had the right to unilaterally declassify and release information, released part of a CIA summary of the situation in the Middle East prepared on 6 October 1973 that had seriously misjudged Egyptian and other Arab intentions. The CIA and the White House both objected, maintaining that the release compromised sources and national security. As released, the report read: "The (deleted) large-scale mobilization exercise may be an effort to soothe internal problems as much as to improve military capabilities. Mobilization of some personnel, increased readiness of isolated units, and greater communications security are all assessed as part of the exercise routine.... There are still no military or political indicators of Egyptian intentions or preparation to resume hostilities with Israel." According to Agency officials and the White House, the release of the four words "and greater communications security" meant that the United States had the capability to monitor Egyptian communications systems. But the Agency and the White House were on shaky ground. Kissinger himself had leaked the same information to Marvin and Bernard Kalb for their book on Kissinger. Discussing the Yom Kippur war, the Kalb brothers wrote: "Finally, from a secret US base in southern Iran, the National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic intelligence, picked up signals indicating that the Egyptians had set up a vastly more complicated field communications network than mere "maneuvers" warranted."
  
• 9/12/1975 To add fuel to the fire, on 12 September 1975, Pike subpoenaed records relating to the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. His action touched off a major (albeit short-lived) war between the Pike Committee and the White House. The CIA played a secondary role in this knockdown Constitutional struggle. On the same day, President Ford ordered that the Pike Committee be cut off from all access to classified documents and forbade administration officials from testifying before the committee. Despite this action, each of the principals--the White House, the CIA, and the House of Representatives--sought a political compromise that would avoid a court test. The Pike Committee itself proposed to resolve the issue by giving the executive branch a 24-hour notice before release of information in order to provide for consultation.
  
• 9/14/1975 Pope Paul VI proclaimed Elizabeth Ann Seton as America's first native-born Saint.
  
• 9/15/1975 George T. Kalaris, who has replaced James J. Angleton as Chief of Counterintelligence/CIA, writes a memo to the executive assistant to the deputy of Operations (DDO) of the CIA, describing the contents of LHO's 201 file. The significance of this Kalaris memo is that it discloses the existence of pre-assassination knowledge of LHO's activities in the Cuban Consulate. On page 777 of the W.C. report is the statement that it was not known that LHO had visited the Cuban Embassy until AFTER the assassination. (Neither the Church committee nor the HSCA is able to get to the bottom of this issue: Did the CIA withhold this information from the W.C.?) The CIA has now released to the public a list of documents from their 100-300-11 file. It has been stripped clean of the LHO reports that were maintained in it during the eight weeks before JFK's murder.
  
• 9/15/1975 Time magazine article "The Oswald Coverup" pinned the blame on John Mohr for ordering the destruction of the Oswald-Hosty note.
  
• 9/18/1975 Patty Hearst was arrested by FBI agents in San Francisco in a surprise raid on the apartment of Steve Soliah and Wendy Yoshimura. Sara Jane Moore worried that her radical friends would think she was somehow involved.
  
• 9/18/1975 In a memo an anonymous CIA official described how, in 11/1963, he quickly checked their files on Oswald because "we were extremely concerned at the time that Oswald, as an American returning from the USSR, might have been routinely debriefed by D.C.D. [Domestic Contacts Division.]" He reported that he found no agency contact with Oswald. (item 1188-1000 dated 9/18/1975)
  
• 9/18/1975 Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke orders a retesting and examination of ballistics evidence in the RFK assassination.
  
• 9/20/1975 R. Sargent Shriver announces he will run for president in 1976.
  
• 9/20/1975 US astronauts from the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project begin a two-week tour of the USSR.
  
• 9/20/1975 Sara Jane Moore called the San Francisco police to say that she was considering a "test" of the presidential security system. She said she was carrying a gun.
  
• 9/21/1975 Bob Woodward reported that E. Howard Hunt had been ordered to kill Jack Anderson 12/1971 or 1/1972 with an untraceable poison, but it had been scrapped at the last moment, "but only after a plan had been devised to make Anderson's death appear accidental." (Washington Post)
  
• 9/21/1975 A San Francisco policeman interviewed Sara Jane Moore, confiscated her .44 caliber pistol, and alerted the Secret Service. She wasn't detained because, police said, the SS felt she "was not of sufficient protection interest to warrant surveillance." Tonight, two SS agents met with her but concluded that she was psychologically incapable of assassination.
  
• 9/22/1975 For the second time in 17 days, President Gerald Ford escapes possible assassination when a woman fires a gun as he steps out of a hotel in San Francisco. His assailant is identified as Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old activist. This morning, Sara Jane Moore took her nine-year-old son to school, and drove out to Danville to buy a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver from a right-wing gun dealer, Mark Fernwood. She drove back to the city erratically and at excessive speeds, hoping that she would be stopped; she wasn't. Back in San Francisco, she parked her car and walked to the St. Francis Hotel. She continued to be nervous and ambivalent. After a three-hour wait, Ford emerged at 3:30pm, shortly before the time she had decided to leave to pick up her son from school. Her aim was deflected by an alert former Marine, Oliver Sipple, though she was also about 40 feet away. Vincent Bugliosi stated, "The Sara Jane Moore incident spotlighted the Secret Service's utter incompetence even more than the Fromme case. A week after Squeaky's attempted assassination, the president goes to San Francisco, where...Moore had already called inspector Jack O'Keefe of the San Francisco police department to say that she was inclined to test the presidential security system when Ford appeared at Stanford on Sunday. The police placed her under arrest, seized her gun - a .44-caliber automatic - and then told the Secret Service about her. The Secret Service checked on...Moore and concluded she wasn't going to do anything because she'd been an informant for the FBI." The SS told the police to let her out of prison, and the next day she shot at Ford with a .38 caliber revolver. She was using flat-nosed slugs designed to create a gaping wound. This morning, she had taken her son to school, then drove to Danville and paid $145 for a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. She loaded the gun as she crossed the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge. Ford emerged from the St. Francis Hotel at 3:29pm, and Moore was standing 40ft away. The deflected shot ricocheted off a wall and wounded a nearby cabdriver.
  
• 9/22/1975 The New York Times reports that "the Central Intelligence Agency secretly tape-recorded two telephone conversations between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City eight weeks before President Kennedy was shot to death Nov. 22, 1963, government sources familiar with the events said Saturday .... The call to the Cuban Embassy, the sources said, was not associated with Oswald until after Kennedy's death ..." The CIA says it routinely destroyed the tape before the assassination. Yet, according to a CIA translator, the transcript of these conversations aroused a great deal of interest at the time and was picked up right away. Transcripts were normally picked up a day or two after being transcribed. When asked if they could explain the agency's actions, some CIA officers stationed at the time in Mexico City say the CIA may have had a relationship with Oswald that it sought to conceal. The CIA denies this.
  
• 9/22/1975 Today, Jackie Kennedy Onassis begins work for Viking Press in New York City.
  
• 9/22/1975 By September, the relationship between the Pike Committee and intelligence community was even worse. The CIA Review Staff found the Pike Committee requests for documents "silly" and the deadlines impossible to meet. For example, the committee on 22 September 1975 issued a request for "any and all documents" relating to a series of covert operations. At the bottom of the request it added it would like them "today, if possible."
  
• 9/23/1975 NY Times reported that the Justice Dept was considering possible criminal charges against those involved in the destruction of the Oswald-Hosty note. Two months later they concluded that because Oswald was dead, no laws had been broken.
  
• 9/24/1975 Three Days of the Condor premieres. It is a 1975 US conspiracy/political thriller film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow.
  
• 9/25/1975 Anthony Lewis commented in the NY Times that "The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country...It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason."
  
• 9/26/1975 At a joint meeting at the White House on 26 September, Ford agreed to lift his order prohibiting the further release of classified materials to the Pike Committee. In return, Pike and McClory agreed on having the President be the ultimate judge in any future disputes over the public release of classified materials. The near war over the declassification issue detracted from the committee's work of evaluating the overall performance of the IC. In general, however, the committee was critical of the performance of US intelligence in predicting the 1973 Mideast war; the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam; the 1974 coup in Cyprus; the 1974 coup in Portugal; the 1974 testing of a nuclear device by India; and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For example, using the Agency's own postmortems on the Yom Kippur war, the committee found that the "principal conclusions concerning the commencement of hostilities...were--quite simply, obviously, and starkly--wrong." In earlier testimony before the committee, Colby admitted that, "We did not cover ourselves with glory. We predicted the day before the war broke out that it was not going to break out."
  
• 9/28/1975 The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, costing $126 million, is formally dedicated during ceremonies attended by President Gerald R. Ford and other guests. FBI headquarters units began moving into the new building in October 1974.
  
• 9/1975 Skeptic magazine has a special issue "Who Killed JFK?" the articles are supportive of the lone gunman scenario.
  
• 10/1975 In his first publicized post-White House appearance outside of his San Clemente retreat, Nixon went to the La Costa Country Club for a golf tournament run by Teamster boss Frank Fitzsimmons. Anthony Provenzano, Allen Dorfman and Jack Presser were at the tournament. A couple of other men present hid their faces from photographers.
  
• 10/1975 Mark Lane presided over the first "national convention" on the JFK assassination, held at the University of Hartford. Jim Garrison appeared and told a cheering crowd that the CIA and FBI had plotted the assassination.
  
• 10/1975 Attorney Vincent Bugliosi finds further confirmation of bullet holes that would bring the total fired in the pantry of The Ambassador Hotel, the night RFK was murdered, to more than eight.
  
• 10/1975 "The Guns of Dallas" by L. Fletcher Prouty appeared in the October, 1975 issue of Gallery, a porno magazine which billed Fletcher Prouty as the "National Affairs Editor." Some people feel there is no credible way to justify associating oneself with such exploitative and demeaning media. Fletcher Prouty has told me that since the Ballentine paperback edition of The Secret Team was "disappeared" soon after it came out in February of 1974, it was very difficult for him to find publishers who would print his writings (from 9/74 to 7/75 he was able to get 7 articles published in Genesis (another porno magazine), and from 9/75 to 6/78 he got 14 articles printed in Gallery). Up until the Ballentine paperback was squelched, he had been published in the likes of The Nation, The New Republic, (including cover-story features), and Air Force Magazine. It is a telling indictment of the reality of the lack of public access to the mainstream corporate press, that a man like Fletcher Prouty -- who served in the Air Force for 23 years, rose to the rank of Colonel, was a briefing officer in the Pentagon from 1955 thru 12/31/63, serving also as Focal Point Officer (liason) between the DOD and the CIA, first in the Headquarters of the Air Force (1955 to 1960), where he set up and then ran the structures that supplied Air Force logistical (military hardware) support for CIA clandestine operations world-wide, then in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (1960 into 1961), and then in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1961 thru 12/31/63) where he ran the same support for all branches of the military -- that a man possessing such critical first-hand experience and knowledge of the mechanisms, methodogy and factual history of CIA covert operations in this seminal period, would find his writings and analysis of these important issues essentially barred from the most generally accessible publications. As long as the conglomerate press in this country continues to increasingly restrict the range and variety of points of view being published, writers will resort to certain types of publishers they would not choose to go to if they had a better alternative.
  
• 10/2-7/1975 the AFL-CIO holds its convention in San Francisco.
  
• 10/6/1975 In a television speech, Ford asked for a cut of $28 billion in taxes and spending.
  
• 10/7/1975 Ford signs a $3.96 billion military construction bill for FY 1976 and the July-Sept transition period.'
  
• 10/7/1975 Victor Marchetti told Bernard Fensterwald that Helms had instructed his top aides in the CIA to "do all we can to help [Clay] Shaw" during his 1969 trial.
  
• 10/7/1975 Conclusions of the retesting of Sirhan's revolver were announced: experts concluded that there was no evidence of more than one gun firing the bullets.
  
• 10/8/1975 Ford asks Congress to establish a National Commission on Regulatory Reform.
  
• 10/9/1975 Andre Sakharov became the first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
  
• 10/14/1975 Ford escaped injury when his limo was struck broadside by another car in Hartford, Connecticut.
  
• 10/17/1975 Kissinger recalled that Nixon was an "odd, artificial and unpleasant man" though he also said that he was "one of our better Presidents...He was very decisive in his own way." (New York Times)
  
• 10/20/1975 US announces agreement with USSR to sell them 6 to 8 million tons of grain a year.
  
• 10/20/1975 Government reports that the GNP grew at an annual rate of 11.2% during the third quarter.
  
• 10/20/1975 NY Times quoted George and Priscilla McMillan (formerly Priscilla Johnson, CIA-connected media asset) were quoted as saying "the extraordinary vitality of the rumors about the Dallas assassination is one of the astonishing phenomena of American life in the past decade." These theories "have become a permanent enclave of irrationality in our national consciousness."
  
• 10/23/1975 Former ambassador to Chile Edward Korry told the Church Committee that he had been opposed to overthrowing Allende in Chile: "The CIA is amoral...it could operate behind my back, not merely with the President of the United States, but with Chileans....In that sense, the CIA could be an 'invisible' government."
  
• 10/23/1975 Richard Case Nagell letter to Rep. Don Edwards, urging him to investigate "the circumstances surrounding the destruction of a registered letter that I dispatched to...Hoover in September 1963, informing him of a conspiracy involving Oswald and two Cuban refugees to assassinate President Kennedy." (Man Who Knew Too Much 55)
  
• 10/25/1975 Soviet-US grain deal, with the Russians agreeing to buy 6-8 million tons of US grain a year.
  
• 10/27/1975 UFO sightings over Loring Air Force Base. Security personnel who were assigned on guard duty for the nuclear weapons depot spotted what at first was thought to be a helicopter flying very low and coming toward the nuclear depot. The craft had a red 'navigation' light and a bright white strobe light. At the same time, personnel in the control tower also spotted the object on their radar screens. Several attempts were made by the operators to contact the craft via radio but they received no response. The craft was then observed to circle the nuclear storage unit, and at one point to within an estimated 300yards of it. The craft hovered over the storage unit for a few more minutes and then suddenly shot away at a tremendous speed. All relevant military authorities such as NORAD were notified, but no explanation could be found. The men in charge at Loring put it down as 'just another unexplained event'!. However, the very next night, the 28th October, the same thing happened again. This time jeeps, MPs, and senior officers were all dispatched to the scene. This caused much chaos as the air bases sirens were screaming, flashing lights from the jeeps and other cars were all on as well as the light from the object itself. Once again the object shot away after several minutes of hovering. As a result Col. Richard E. Chapman, requested air support in case the object returned for a third time. The crews were put on 24 hour alert. The craft did not however come back to the base, however strange lights were reported for several weeks in the surrounding towns.
  
• 10/29/1975 Ford announce he was "prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bail-out of New York City to prevent a default...Why...should all the working people of this country be forced to rescue those who bankrolled New York City's policies for so long - the large investors and big banks?"
  
• 10/29/1975 Rep. Don Edwards wrote back to Nagell, asking him for any more information or details on the letter he sent to Hoover.
  
• 10/30/1975 Personnel at the Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, reported seeing what appeared to be running lights of low-flying craft. The craft hovered up and down and performed erratic zigzag manoeuvres. The base received several calls from personnel who were also witnessing this strange object. All of them reported the same object and stated that it was completely silent in operation. A pilot in a KC-135 tanker reported seeing the object also as he was preparing to land. The pilot was ordered to change course and try to observe what the object was. Several times as the KC-135 approached to within a mile or so of the object it would suddenly shoot away at a tremendous speed, this happened 3/4 times before the pilot had to return due to fuel restrictions. The pilot later estimated that the object had travelled in excess of 1,000 knots! A FOIA request managed to turn up the following entry in a NORAD log. "Alerted by NCOC of a helicopter sighted over Wurtsmith AFB Wpns storage area, a tanker sighted same and pursued it 35 SE over Lake Huron. Upon request of NCOC Gen Wainwright and concurrence of Gen Taylor - contacted 379BW CP and offered assistance. Also advised ML,LH and JL alert of possibility of a scramble". There were also several reports from civilians of nearby towns, the same night, who also witnessed the object.
  
• 10/3/19175 Rolando Masferrer is killed by a dynamite bomb in his 1968 Ford Torino. A premailed communiqué signed "Zero" declares the right-winger has been executed because of his "systematic work in the destruction of the anti-Communist struggle."