Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 1975: Los Angeles: Special Counsel Thomas Kranz reinvestigates the RFK assassination for the D.A.'s office, and issues the Kranz Report, which confirms the original police findings.
  
• This year, FBI surveillance of Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello allegedly records Trafficante saying: "Now only two people are alive who know who killed Kennedy." (Official and Confidential, Summers)
  
• This year, three years following the death of J. Edgar Hoover, a congressional committee orders a detailed check on the domestic security files of the ten largest FBI offices. This check indicates that no less that 19 percent of the Bureau's total effort is still devoted to hunting "subversives." Yet criminal conduct is discovered in only four out of 19,700 investigations - and none of those involve national security, espionage or terrorism. (Summers)
  
• During the mid-seventies, two American multinationals collaborate with the Defense Advanced [Research] Projects Agency (DARPA) on a project designed to facilitate the remote recovery of hijacked American aircraft. [This technology] ... allows specialist ground controllers to ... take absolute control of [a hijacked plane's] computerized flight control system by remote means. From that point onwards, regardless of the wishes of the hijackers or flight deck crew, the hijacked aircraft can be recovered and landed automatically at an airport of choice, with no more difficulty than flying a radio-controlled model plane.
  
• 1975 Lt.Colonel Michael Aquino breaks with the Satanic Church of Anton LeVey and founds the Temple of Set, a group which grew to operate on a national level and involved with US agencies in ritual abuse, sacrifice and mind control.
  
• 1975 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute publishes a paper on the "Delayed Toxic Effects of Chemical Warfare Agents", specifically organophosphates. (See 1989 and Los Angeles malathion spraying.)
  
• 1975 US Viking probe goes to Mars to seek signs of life.
  
• A 1975 military manual predicts the development of "ethnic chemical weapons which would be designed to exploit naturally occurring differences in vulnerability among specific population groups." Ref: "Biological Weapons and Third World Targets," Science for the People, July-Aug 1981, pp 16-20.
  
• 1975 A General Accounting Office (GAO) study of the FDA reveals that 150 FDA officials owned stock in the companies they were supposed to regulate.
  
• 1975 The British medical journal Lancet reports on a study which compared the effect on cancer patients of chemotherapy or no treatment at all. No treatment proved significantly better policy for patient survival and quality of life.
  
• 1975 N.M. Rothschild and Sons open operations in Hong Kong to take advantage of liberal gold trading laws.
  
• Gemstone: a conspiracy theory which first surfaced in 1975. Originally a precis by American journalist Stephania Caruana of allegations made in letters by American chemist Bruce Roberts, now deceased, Gemstone attributes much of post-war America's ills to the power of Aristotle Onassis, who had the Kennedys and Dr King assassinated, seized the Howard Hughes empire, did a deal with the Mafia, etc. The subject of a couple of book-length studies to date, Gemstone has appeared in five or six different versions, each one containing new material. Most striking is the `Kiwi Gemstone' in which specifically New Zealand incidents have been embedded in the original American narrative. Authorless, floating round the world in samizdat form, Gemstone is a perfect, small-scale disinformation vehicle for anyone who cares to use it. The Gemstone File is a series of documents by the American writer Bruce Porter Roberts (19191976). The best-known document is probably the 23-page "A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File", written by Stephanie Caruana in 1975, which presents a brief, undocumented series of claims that conspiracies and suppressed information played a major role in shaping world events since the 1950s. In particular, this document named three individuals as the shooters of President John F. Kennedy, and suggested connections between a number of political assassinations which occurred within a relatively short time frame. Factsheet Five publisher Mike Gunderloy collected and distributed several versions of the Gemstone File. Gunderloy has explained that the original Gemstone File was simply a list of contributors to Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), while the subsequent versions gradually linked various figures of the Watergate and Kennedy eras. Roberts says in his Gemstone File letters that he began sending out copies of what had been a private journal to selected people, including journalists, politicians, and heads of foreign states, in 1968. He claimed to have written letters to 27 heads of state which influenced the vote in the United Nations which ousted Taiwan from the United Nations and admitted China instead. "The Gemstone File: A Memoir," by Stephanie Caruana, includes the text of two letters addressed to President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1975. The Gemstone File proposes that Aristotle Onassis, Joseph P. Kennedy, and other prominent figures were involved in various schemes to forward a vast global conspiracy, involving the Mafia and corrupt politicians, brutal oil and drug cartels, rogue military operations, and more. It also posits that early in 1957, Aristotle Onassis had Howard Hughes kidnapped from his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow; that Hughes suffered a massive brain injury during the forcible kidnapping, and that Hughes was subsequently a virtual prisoner of Onassis on Skorpios and injected regularly with morphine, while Onassis took over the operation of Hughes's considerable financial affairs, including airlines and U.S. defense contracting. (At the time, Onassis had a permanent suite rented at the same hotel, along with his many other residences around the globe. Thus he was a "neighbor" of Howard Hughes, and in a position to conceive of, plan, and have the kidnap executed more readily.) In order to cover up Howard Hughes's sudden disappearance from public view, including his career as a ladies' man among Hollywood's leading ladies, a phony "marriage" to actress Jean Peters in Tonopah, Nevada was arranged, with the help of Paul Laxalt. Laxalt later rode this assistance to a career as Governor of Nevada, and later, a U.S. Senate seat. A series of doubles played "Hughes" whenever necessary. "Hughes" (i.e., Onassis acting as "Hughes") suddenly became a major purchaser of Las Vegas casinos, in line with Onassis's previous gambling operations in pre-Castro Cuba and in Monaco. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute was created to serve as a major money-laundering money funnel (tax-free, private, not subject to any monitoring by anyone.) Its true purpose was covered up by generous donations to medical research and also to cultural institutions, but only a small percentage of the amount of money drained from the U.S. economy. One controversial aspect of the Gemstone File is its portrayal of Onassis as the main force behind the election of John F. Kennedy as President, and subsequently, Kennedy's assassination in 1963. According to Bruce Roberts' Gemstone papers, Lee Harvey Oswald was a participant in the JFK assassination plan. He was linked to the Central Intelligence Agency, and to Mafia connections in New Orleans. However, the role he was destined to play in the assassination was as the patsy. The Gemstone File names Jimmy Fratianno, Johnny Roselli, and Eugene Brading as the real shooters. When Robert F. Kennedy decided to run for the Presidency, Aristotle Onassis ordered that he be assassinated. A hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan was allegedly set up to be the ostensible shooter. His wild shots peppered the room, but none of them hit Kennedy. According to the documents, the real shooter was Thane Cesar, a security guard at General Motors, which was secretly owned by Onassis, who was "lent" for the occasion to act as Robert Kennedy's bodyguard. Cesar was walking right behind Kennedy as they entered the Pantry area. While Sirhan Sirhan's shots flew around the room, Cesar lifted a small palm gun and shot Kennedy behind the ear. "The Second Gun," a documentary by Ted Chirach, covers this scenario. Roberts' Gemstone papers also detail the involvement of Joseph P. Kennedy with the Mafia, and with Onassis. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy attempted to break away from Onassis and the Mafia, and the CIA, and that is the basic reason they were shot. The entire document is of unknown length, probably over 1,000 pages. A complete copy is not known to exist, but over 400 pages from the original handwritten file are in existence and available. 220 edited pages from Roberts' original hand-written letters and papers from the period of 1970-1975 are included in the book, The Gemstone File: a Memoir, by Stephanie Caruana.
  
• "Target de Gaulle" by Pierre Demaret and Christian Plume published in 1975. It is largely an account of the 31 assassination attempts on de Gaulle's life, most which were made by the OAS (Secret Army Organization). Some of the similarities between de Gaulle and JFK are quite interesting. - In 1960, when de Gaulle declared Algeria would become independent of France, powerful elements of French society opposed this decision to include elements of the military, intelligence services, cabinet members, big business, and the financial industry. De Gaulle and his loyal security elements correctly assessed that a conspiracy existed to eliminate him as leader of France because they believed he had become a threat to French national security as the loss of Algeria would terminally weaken France as a nation, strengthen the USSR in the Cold War, and spread the influence of Muslims across North Africa. - Various assassination attempts included attacks by snipers, IEDs, and complex urban ambushes with small arms. At one point, a lone sniper was hired to assassinate de Gaulle. The book and movie "Day of the Jackal" by Frederick Forsythe was based on this event and the efforts of the OAS. - Other intelligence services knew that de Gaulle was targeted by various clandestine organizations for death and his security elements were warned at various times to this fact, one time being when the Mossad warned of a planned attack in Algeria. - "The Directorate" and "The Old General Staff" were anonymous French organizations with power at the highest levels (cabinet level) who threw their weight behind various assassination attempts when the opportunity suited them. They were equivalent to what has been described in the U.S. as a "cabal" or "power elite". - The U.S. government, through the CIA, contacted General Salan of the OAS and explored the possibility of arming 50,000 soldiers for the OAS if an independent Algeria under OAS control would provide U.S. business with preferential treatment, allow U.S. military bases in the Sahara, and allow U.S. ballistic missiles be placed in Algeria. - A Captain Mertz aka (Jean Rene Souetre) is described as being an informant for the French SDECE although supposedly supported the OAS as well (pages 100-101). - Suspected conspirators who were captured faced a rigged judicial process, evidence was suppressed, witnesses ignored, and pre-determined outcomes carried through. - When de Gaulle returned from attending JFK's funeral he said, "His story is the same as mine. What happened to Kennedy very nearly happened to me. That was like a cowboy story, but this is merely an OAS story." (Page 240)
  
• Itek Corporation, a photographic analysis firm that "did much of its specialized photo interpretation work as contractors for the federal government, and it was widely held that much of its sensitive work included that performed on CIA-related projects." (Trask, Pictures of the Pain 272) This year CBS had Itek do a thorough study of the Zapruder film. They issued a 94-page report titled, "John Kennedy Assassination Film Analysis": "There is no indication from the Zapruder film that the President was struck by a bullet before he was blocked from Zapruder's view by the Stemmons Freeway sign...One noticeable fluctuation was found on both sets of plots for the car and JFK. It was centered at about frame 190 and lasted for about 4-5 frames...The positions of President Kennedy and Governor Connally in the car at about...frame 186 vicinity..and the locations of their wounds are consistent with the hypothesis that both were struck by a single bullet traveling on a trajectory from the sixth floor corner window of the [TSBD]...the explosion from the bullet impact [on JFK's head] radiates matter in all directions. However, the major, or large particles which are actually measurable on the film, and have contiguous boundaries which hold together during flight, all radiate in a forward direction...The particles traveling upward and forward are traveling very rapidly at velocities on the order of 80mph...At 312-313 the head goes forward approximately 2.3 inches, his shoulder about 1.1 inches. Immediately prior to the impact at frames 312-313 he was moving very slightly in a forward direction...JFK's shoulder and elbow lag the back- ward movement of his head. The shoulder reverses in a smooth turn at frame 315-316, followed by the elbow at 316-317...His backward motion after 313...is significantly different than the forward motion. Mrs Kennedy's motion after 312-313 indicate she caused her own movements and strongly influenced or caused JFK's backward motions...There is an object present in a few frames [around 414] which looks like the head of a man in the bush...It is our belief that the object is a head probably that of one of the bystanders seen in the Nix film standing on the steps." (Trask 123-6)
  

• 1/1975 Ford's popularity rating was around 38%.
  
• 1/1/1975 Erlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell and Mardian are found guilty in the Watergate cover-up. Haldeman, Mitchell and Ehrlichman were also found guilty of obstruction of justice, and Haldeman was found guilty on three counts of perjury. Mitchell was found guilty of lying twice to a grand jury and once to the Watergate Committee, Ehrlichman of two counts of lying to a grand jury.
  
• 1/2/1975 U.S. District Court Judge Richard Owen rules in New York that John Lennon and his lawyers will have access to Department of Immigration files pertaining to his deportation case. Its allows the former Beatles to look into whether the government's case against him is from his 1968 British drug conviction or from his anti-establishment comments during the years of the Nixon administration.
  
• 1/3/1975 Ford signed the Trade Reform Act.
  
• 1/4/1975 US unemployment reached 7.1%, its highest level in 13 years.
  
• 1/4/1975 Ford signed a bill extending community action programs for the poor.
  
• 1/4/1975 In Christianity Today, Billy Graham was quoted as saying that Watergate was "not only unethical but criminal. I can make no excuses for Watergate. I condemn it and I deplore it. It has hurt America."
  
• 1/4/1975 Ford announced he would appoint a presidential commission to investigate possible illegal domestic surveillance activity by the CIA, but assured Americans that "in the world in which we live, beset by continuing threats to our national security, it is vital that we maintain an effective intelligence and counter-intelligence capability.
  
• 1/4/1975 NYT story by Seymour Hersh: "President Ford plans to meet with Richard Helms within the next few days, White House officials said today, as part of his promised review into allegations of illegal domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Helms, the former Director of Central Intelligence, whom well-placed government sources have called a key figure in domestic spying, returned to Washington today on what State Department officials said was a prearranged home leave from his post as Ambassador to Iran. There's going to be no whitewash of this,' one White House aide said. He's (President Ford) going to see all the principals.' The President, who has made no substantial public statement on the alleged spying since the first reports two weeks ago, met separately today with Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, and William E. Colby, the Director of Central Intelligence. After his meeting with the President, Mr. Kissinger told newsmen that he planned to meet at the State Department tomorrow with Mr. Helms, who has been quoted as denying any involvement in "illegal" domestic activities....In a related development, Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, who announced last Sunday that he had received independent confirmation of the spying allegations, told newsmen today that he knew of no foreign intelligence factors behind the CIA's decision to begin compiling dossiers on nearly 10,000 antiwar leaders and other dissidents. Ron Nessen, the White House press secretary, refused to say after today's series of Presidential meetings whether any specific action would be taken. But he did say the President planned to have his own investigation of the CIA's domestic activities completed by the middle of next week. That investigation, he said, will establish the facts.' The seeming thrust of Mr. Nessen's remarks was that the President was not planning to accept at face value a CIA report on the spying, prepared and submitted 10 days ago by Mr. Colby. I think the Colby report did contain facts,' Mr. Nessen said in response to questions, but obviously the President wants to pursue the matter further.'...Mr. Colby's report, however, did not include specific details about he nature of the crimes committed and dossiers maintained...Reliable sources have said that it was Mr. Schlesinger who first ordered an end to domestic spying and the domestic file-keeping inside the agency. Mr. Schlesinger is also credited with ordering an end to all other illegal domestic activities. He has refused to comment on the current dispute. Since the disclosure of the alleged domestic spying, at least four top aides in the CIA's Counterintelligence Division have resigned."
  
• 1/4/1975 NYT reported: "The Justice Department has decided not to prosecute anyone in connection with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 15-year-campaign to disrupt the activities of suspected subversive organizations. The decision was reached after Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger, head of the Civil Rights Division, reported to Attorney General William B. Saxbe that he had found no basis for criminal charges against any particular individual involving particular incidents.' But Mr. Pottinger also told Mr. Saxbe, according to a Justice spokesman, that he had not reviewed the entire 60,000 pages of records of the so-called Cointelpro (for counterintelligence program) and that any allegations of specific violations that might come in later could still lead to criminal charges. The operation was reviewed earlier by a team headed by Henry E. Petersen, who retired Dec. 31 as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division. He concluded that no charges were justified, but he also sent Mr. Saxbe two reports that have not been made public. One argued against prosecution of present or former FBI officials; the other said that prosecution of some criminal offenses might be called for. Mr. Saxbe then asked Mr. Pottinger to review the bureau's actions to see if there had been violations of the civil rights laws. If there had, two sections of the criminal code making it an offense to deprive citizens of their civil rights seemed most likely to have been violated. Mt. Pottinger replied that he had found no basis for criminal charges. Then Mr. Saxbe asked him to make a more thorough study, which resulted in the same conclusion. A report on Cointelpro released by Mr. Saxbe and the FBI director, Clarence M. Kelly, Nov. 18 said that some of the bureau's practices under the program were abhorrent in a free society.' Mr. Kelly said, however, that he did not think use of the word abhorrent' was justified."
  
• 1/4/1975 President Ford meets with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who reports to Ford on a recent conversation with friend and former CIA Director Richard Helms. As he would with no one else, Helms has pulled no punches regarding "The Family Jewels." "These stories are just the tip of the iceberg," he tells Kissinger. "If they come out, blood will flow." Helms adds: "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro." Kissinger passes this information along to President Ford in a memo of his conversation with Helms. This memo was kept secret for twenty-three years.
  
• 1/5/1975 (Sunday) Rugaber, Walter - "Ford Sets Up Commission on CIA's Domestic Role" - New York Times 1/5/1975
  
• 1/5/1975 G. Gordon Liddy, in a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace, defended the Watergate break-in: "Power exists to be used...I think [Nixon] has demonstrated towards the end of his presidency that he was insufficiently ruthless..." Liddy felt Nixon should have destroyed the tapes, and he compared Dean to Judas. He called Magruder "an accomplished, skillful liar."
  
• 1/5/1975 President Ford creates the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the illegal domestic intelligence activities of the CIA, appointing Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as Chairman and former Warren commission assistant counsel David Belin as Director. Tom Wicker of the N.Y. Times writes: "The blue ribbon commission appointed by President Ford to protect the public against domestic spying by the CIA looks suspiciously like a goat sent to guard a cabbage patch. Having the CIA investigated by such a group is like having the Mafia audited by its own accountants." Some of the members include: C. Douglas Dillon, as an Eisenhower undersecretary of state, had participated in deliberations over the fate of Cuba's Fidel Castro and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, both marked for assassination by the CIA. He was a director of the Institute of International Education, a recipient of CIA funds. General Lyman Leminitzer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been active in planning the Bay of Pigs invasion and supported the CIA's desire for direct U.S. military intervention, only to be overruled by Kennedy. Erwin Griswold, former Harvard Law School dean, argued in 1971 on behalf of the Nixon administration to block the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. In 1972, he argued before the Supreme Court that the U.S. Army's surveillance of citizens opposing the Vietnam War violated neither federal law nor those citizens' First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly or speech. He lost both cases. John T. Connor was director of David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank. He had also been president of Allied Chemical, in which the Rockefellers held $52 million in stock. Ronald Reagan, former actor and California governor. Reagan, who would soon be President, had no experience with the CIA. He attended few of the Commission's sessions. Ford makes a serious fumble when he tells a group of newspaper editors that he needs people on the commission who can be trusted lest they stumble upon evidence of assassinations. If the commission is investigating illegal DOMESTIC CIA activities, what assassinations could Ford possibly be referring to? Former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, will testify to the Commission that his work on the Vietnam War was so consuming that he has "lost virtually all memory of what took place in the Kennedy administration." When pressed on this issue, McNamara says, "I have no notes - I did not take any notes of any meeting I attended with rare exception, and I have no other basis for refreshing my memory, and my memory of those years is very bad." McGeorge Bundy's testimony is also full of "I can't recall" and "I don't remember" responses. "Since I had served as assistant counsel with the Warren Commission," Belin later reported, "I removed myself from the direct responsibility for any investigation pertaining to the assassination." The Kennedy work was thus delegated to Senior Counsel Robert B. Olsen. Belin did not keep completely hands off, however. In 1988 he admitted that when Rockefeller's medical experts convened to review JFK's autopsy evidence, the irrepressible Belin personally attended that meeting, examining the autopsy photographs and X-rays right alongside his consultants. One year from now, Robert McNamara will testify before a Congressional committee saying he knew the plots against Fidel Castro had not originated with the CIA, but can't say why or how he knew it. In 1988, Richard Helms will say: "A lot of people probably lied about what had happened in the effort to get rid of Castro ....There are two things you have to understand: Kennedy wanted to get rid of Castro, and the agency was not about to undertake anything like that on its own."
  
• 1/5/1975 Timothy Crouse, of the Village Voice, writes: "A subtle pattern begins to emerge. One suspects that the Agency may be trying to peddle certain crimes of its own choice, trying to guide the Church Committee toward certain items and away from .... God knows what."
  
• 1/5/1975 The CIA's retired Western Hemisphere Chief J. C. King believes he can put to rest, once and for all, the question of White House authorization. King has an office at CIA headquarters which has been provided for him since his retirement. In this office is a safe in which King has kept a document showing that RFK had authorized the plots against Castro. King goes to retrieve the document with the intention of providing it to The Church Committee. He finds that the document is missing.
  
• 1/7/1975 David Belin, who had been involved with the Warren Commission, chosen as executive director of the Rockefeller Commission by Ford. Tom Wicker commented that the Commission "looks suspiciously like a goat set to guard a cabbage patch. Having the CIA investigated by such a group is like having the Mafia audited by its own accountants."
  
• 1/7/1975 US embassy in Phnom Penh cabled Washington: "Khmer Communist troops blasted their way into the New Year with major attacks all around Phnom Penh…[they] have gotten 81-millimeter mortars, rockets and possibly 105mm howitzer rounds periously close to Pochentong Airport. More serious are Khmer communist gains along the Mekong…"
  
• 1/9/1975 Ford signed an executive order establishing a National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, 1975.
  
• 1/9/1975 Rabbi Baruch Korff, a Nixon friend, visited the former President on his 62nd birthday and found him to be underweight.
  
• 1/10/1975 More than a decade after JFK's assassination, on January 10, 1975, William Attwood testified at a top-secret executive session of Senator Frank Church's Committee on Intelligence Activities. There the question was posed to Attwood: "Were you asked by President Kennedy to explore the possibility of a rapprochement with Fidel Castro and Cuba ? " Attwood answered: "Yes . . . yes, approaches were made and contact was established and this was done with the knowledge, approval, and encouragement of the White House. " William Attwood was well qualified for such a role. As a distinguished journalist, Attwood had interviewed Fidel Castro in 1959 soon after the Cuban revolution for two articles in Look magazine .
  
• 1/11/1975 Former Sen. Fred R. Harris joins the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 1/12/1975 Eugene McCarthy announces he will campaign as an independent for the presidency.
  
• 1/13/1975 Ford proposed a $16 billion tax cut.
  
• 1/13/1975 Rockefeller Commission meeting: Belin claims he recommended having as many public meetings as possible to allay public suspicions, and also to have every word said by Commission members taken down in the record. His ideas were not adopted. (Final Disclosure)
  
• 1/13/1975 Time reported that "FBI agents once discovered that a Manhattan-based CIA man was in close touch with a Pittsburgh Mafia Chief [John LaRocca] who was being probed by the FBI. The FBI protested so vehemently that the CIA operative was sent to Italy until FBI tempers cooled."
  
• 1/14/1975 The 94th Congress convenes.
  
• 1/14/1975 Ford announced his intention to nominate Edward H. Levi as Attorney General and William T. Coleman, Jr. to be Secretary of Transportation. Coleman was assistant counsel on the Warren Commission.
  
• 1/15/1975 Ford gave his State of the Union address; it was a downbeat speech ("I must say to you the state of the union is not good"), focusing on the nation's ills. He urged the building of many new power plants and the stockpiling of oil reserves; a $16 billion income tax cut; a ceiling on federal pay raises and government spending; a windfall profits tax to guard against oil industry profiteering; discourage energy consumption by raising the price of oil and gas. Critics on both the right and left charged that Ford was abandoning the fight against inflation and allowing the deficit to rise. His administration also announced that it foresaw a combined deficit of $75 billion for the next two years. Ford also asked Congress not to tie his hands on foreign policy.
  
• 1/15/1975 The new reformist members of Congress abandoned the seniority system and dumped Rep. Wright Patman (D-Tex) as chairman of the House Banking, Currency and Housing Committee, and Rep. Wayne L. Hays (D-Ohio) as chairman of the Administration Committee. Patman, age 81, though a fierce populist, was considered too old to continue in his post.
  
• 1/15/1975 William Saxbe told the press that the Nixon White House pressured him to interfere in Jaworski's investigation, but he refused. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 1/15/1975 Colby admitted that the CIA had spied on US political dissidents, opened peoples' mail, infiltrated political groups and had files on more than 100,000 Americans. Colby made assurances that such abuses were all in the past.
  
• 1/16/1975 US District Court in D.C. awarded $12 million in damages to 1,200 prisoners who had been jailed in the May Day demonstrations of 1971; the suit had been filed by the ACLU against the District of Columbia. The court found that their rights under the 1st and 8th amendments had been violated.
  
• 1/16/1975 Ford held a White House luncheon for the editors of the NY Times. Someone asked why Ford had picked such a conservative and defense minded panel to make up the Rockefeller Commission. The president said he needed people who would not stray from the straight and narrow. If they did, they could stumble upon matters that might hurt the national interest. The editor asked "Like what?" Ford replied with, "Like assassinations!" (Schorr, p. 144) Ford added that this was off the record. But reporter Daniel Schorr deduced that since the Rockefeller Commission was investigating domestic matters, Ford must have meant American assassinations. (ibid) But later CIA Director William Colby effectively spun Ford's comment . He told Schorr that the CIA had run assassination plots abroad, but not in America. (ibid) This deftly neutralized Ford's slip. The committees would now look at CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders. From Schorr's book Staying Tuned': "A few days later President Ford held a long-scheduled luncheon for New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger and several of his editors. Toward the end the subject of the newly named Rockefeller commission came up. Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal observed that, dominated by establishment figures, the panel might not have much credibility with critics of the CIA. Ford nodded and explained that he had to he cautious in his choices because, with complete access to files, the commission might learn of matters, under presidents dating back to Truman, far more serious than the domestic surveillance they had been instructed to look into. The ensuing hush was broken by Rosenthal. "Like what?" "Like assassinations," the president shot back. Prompted by an alarmed news secretary Ron Nessen, the president asked that his remark about assassinations be kept off the record. The Times group returned to their bureau for a spirited argument about whether they could pass up a story potentially so explosive. Managing Editor E. C. Daniel called the White House in the hope of getting Nessen to ease the restriction from "off-the-record" to "deep background." Nessen was more adamant than ever that the national interest dictated that the president's unfortunate slip be forgotten. Finally, Sulzberger cut short the debate, saying that, as the publisher, he would decide, and he had decided against the use of the incendiary information. This left several of the editors feeling quite frustrated, with the inevitable result that word of the episode began to get around, eventually reaching me. Under no off-the-record restriction myself, I enlisted CBS colleagues in figuring out how to pursue the story. Since Ford had used the word assassinations, we assumed we were looking for persons who had been murdered - possibly persons who had died under suspicious circumstances. We developed a hypothesis, but no facts." The House of Representatives in 1975 established a special committee to investigate the activities of the intelligence community. On 16 January 1975, Democratic Representative Michael Harrington introduced a resolution in the House to create a select committee to conduct such an investigation. Even Democratic Representative Lucien Nedzi, Chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and a strong supporter of the Agency, concurred in the need for such a broadly representative committee. Republican Minority Leader John J. Rhodes also endorsed the proposal. Only a few members of the House questioned whether it was necessary to create such a committee in light of the Church Committee investigations in the Senate and the Rockefeller Commission investigation in the executive branch.
  
• 1/20/1975 The Washington Post confirmed long-standing rumors that the FBI had secret dossiers on members of Congress.
  
• 1/21/1975 Ron Kessler in the Washington Post wrote: "...the son of the late House Majority Leader Boggs has told The Post that the FBI leaked to his father damaging material on the personal lives of critics of its investigation into John F. Kennedy's assassination. Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. said his father...was given the material in an apparent attempt to discredit the critics. The material, which Thomas Boggs made available, includes photographs of sexual activity and reports on alleged communist affiliations of some authors of articles and books on the assassination....the experience played a large role in his father's decision to publicly charge the FBI with Gestapo tactics in a 1971 speech..."
  
• 1/22/1975 Ford signed two international agreements banning chemical and biological warfare.
  
• 1/26/1975 US Geological Survey announces discovery of oldest-known rock, scientifically dated as 3.8 billion years old.
  
• 1/27/1975 US Senate establishes Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) to look into wrongdoing in the intelligence community. Headed by Sen. Frank Church, the Committee made headlines right away with revelations about FBI/CIA/NSA/Army Intelligence wrongdoing, particularly domestic spying and assassinations of foreign leaders. They appointed Sens. Gary Hart (D-Col.) and Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.) to do a special study of the CIA and FBI responses to the assassination; they did not actually reopen the assassination case itself. Members: Frank Church, Robert Morgan, Barry Goldwater, Phillip A. Hart, Gary Hart, Charles McC. Mathias, Walter F. Mondale, John G. Tower, Richard Schweiker, Walter D. Huddleston, Howard H. Baker. Staffers: Paul Wallach, Mike Epstein. "The Committee investigated the intelligence agencies' activities [by] doing a paper investigation of documents provided by the agencies themselves. No one was leaving Washington, no one was doing any original probing...the [CIA] officer assigned to guide the Senate probers through the Agency's files was the very one who had performed the same chore for the Warren Commission....Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, but within hours of the assassination a rush of leads and tips related to Miami suddenly popped up. And now, as word of Schweiker's interest in the assassination spread, he was flooded with suggestions of a Miami connection." (The Last Investigation 33-4) Their 1976 report found that while investigating the assassination in 1963-64 "top FBI officials were continually concerned with protecting the Bureau's reputation." Its first hearings began 9/16/1975, and wrapped up 6/1976. Its final sub-report dealt specifically with the JFK assassination. While they found no evidence of a conspiracy, they were sharply critical of the CIA and FBI handling of the case. The Committee reported that an anonymous Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Inspector disclosed evidence Oswald had been using a second identity as a "Cuban alien" in New Orleans. "[H]e is absolutely certain that he interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in a New Orleans jail cell sometime shortly before his [the Inspector's] April 1 1963 transfer out of New Orleans." He was uncertain about the name Oswald had been using, but he claimed to be "a Cuban alien." After interviewing Oswald, the Inspector was certain that he was not really a Cuban. The Inspector said there was little else to tell about the incident; the Committee found his testimony highly credible. The WC had concluded that Oswald was living in Texas during that time (Feb or March 1963). The Committee could find no other information or reports about the incident. (Report p91) The Committee could find no one to definitively put the blame on for the anti-Castro plots, since little in the way of a paper trail had been left. Senator Robert Morgan, Democrat of North Carolina and a member of this Committee, will eventually state: "There is no doubt in my mind that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by Fidel Castro, or someone under his influence, in retaliation for our efforts to assassinate him."
  
• 1/28/1975 Ford asked Congress for $522 million more in aid to Saigon and Cambodia. Ford reveals that North Vietnam has 289,000 troops in the South, with massive tank and artillery support.
  
• 1/31/1975 SALT II talks resume in Geneva.
  
• 1/31/1975 Charles Colson released from prison after seven months. Federal judge Charles R. Richey in Washington ruled that millions of Nixon's documents, including the Watergate tapes, were the property of the government, not the former president.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 2/1975 In Mexico City, the exiled leaders of Chile's Popular Unity coalition met to discuss the situation in Chile.
  
• 2/1975 This issue of men's magazine Genesis contained an article called "The Forty Committee" by L. Fletcher Prouty
  
• 2/3/1975 Aristotle Onassis's heart condition becomes worse when he gets another bout of the flu. He has learned that he is suffering from myasthenia gravis, a progressive muscular disease.
  
• 2/6/1975 Senator Henry Jackson enters the presidential race.
  
• 2/6/1975 Jackie Onassis, Christina Onassis, Ari's sister Artemis and a team of doctors accompany Aristotle Onassis to Paris, where he refuses to go directly into the hospital. Instead, he proceeds to his apartment on Avenue Foch where he stays for three days. His condition quickly deteriorates and he has an operation to remove his gallbladder.
  
• 2/7/1975 Labor Dept reports that the unemployment rate is 8.2%, the highest since 1941.
  
• 2/7/1975 On NBC's Today program, Chuck Colson said that the FBI provided much information to Nixon about JFK's affair with Inga Arvad in WWII.
  
• 2/10/1975 Time's Hugh Sidney revealed that Lyndon Johnson greatly enjoyed listening to the FBI's tape recordings of Martin Luther King and reading their transcripts (which also included King's sexual liaisons.) Though LBJ told the press that Hoover was the "greatest living American...Without Hoover, this country would have gone Communist 30 years ago," privately he told cronies that "I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out that outside the tent pissing in." Johnson also joked that he didn't trust anyone except his wife, and "Sometimes I'm not too sure about her."
  
• 2/10-15/1975 Kissinger visited the Middle East.
  
• 2/10/1975 Bill Moyers in Newsweek recalled that LBJ was worried about what China and Russia might do if he was seen as being "soft" in Vietnam: "I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way of China."
  
• 2/11/975 Paul B. Fay, Jr., JFK's Navy Undersecretary, was quoted as saying: "If John F. Kennedy had lived, our military involvement in Vietnam would have been over by the end of 1964." (Santa Barbara News-Press)
  
• 2/11/1975 Richard Ratsimandrava, president of Madagascar, was shot dead in Tananarive.
  
• 2/12/1975 Aristotle Onassis is put on a respirator and is given massive infusions of antibiotics
  
• 2/14/1975 Northern Mariana Islands became a US commonwealth.
  
• 2/16/1975 About a week after photographs of the three "tramps" arrested in Dallas on the day of the assassination are published in many newspapers, the photographer Jack Beers dies of a heart attack.
  
• 2/16-17/1975 Kissinger meets with Gromyko in Geneva to discuss the Middle East.
  
• 2/16-7/21/1975 Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks: attempt to reduce forces in Europe.
  
• 2/17/1975 Sen. Lloyd Bentsen enters the presidential race.
  
• 2/18/1975 The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress puts out a study of covert activities of the CIA to date. According to William Blum, thanks to the burying of information and obscuring of history, the Library of Congress was only able to come up with a small number of the actual overseas incidents the CIA has been involved in. (Killing Hope)
  
• 2/19/1975 The House voted 286 to 120 to create a House Select Intelligence Committee (the Nedzi Committee, which was replaced five months later by the Pike Committee) to investigate claims of CIA wrondoing. It was headed by Democratic Representative Otis Pike of New York. While the Church Committee centered its attention on the more sensational charges of illegal activities by the CIA and other components of the intelligence community (IC), the Pike Committee set about examining the CIA's effectiveness and its costs to taxpayers. Unfortunately, Representative Pike, the committee, and its staff never developed a cooperative working relationship with the Agency or the Ford administration. The committee soon was at odds with the CIA and the White House over questions of access to documents and information and the declassification of materials. Relations between the Agency and the Pike Committee became confrontational. CIA officials came to detest the committee and its efforts at investigation. Many observers maintained moreover, that Representative Pike was seeking to use the committee hearings to enhance his senatorial ambitions, and the committee staff, almost entirely young and anti-establishment, clashed with Agency and White House officials. The committee consisted of seven Democrats and three Republicans. Because it was a select committee, the House leadership appointed the members. Unlike the Senate Committee, which was carefully balanced politically, Speaker of the House Carl Albert and Majority Leader Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., chose to give the committee a liberal Democratic majority. All Democratic members of the Nedzi Committee had strong negative feelings about the IC. Democratic Congressman Ron Dellums, for example, stated even before the creation of the committee that "I think this committee ought to come down hard and clear on the side of stopping any intelligence agency in this country from utilizing, corrupting, and prostituting the media, the church, and our educational system." Albert and O'Neill selected Nedzi as committee chairman. Nedzi, a 14-year veteran of the House, also had strong liberal credentials. He had opposed the Vietnam war, the development of the B-1 bomber, and the antiballistic missile system. Since 1971, he had served as chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. As chairman, Nedzi had conducted a thorough investigation into the CIA's role in Watergate. CIA officials found Nedzi to be a solid choice, but other Democrats in the House and on the committee had major reservations. Harrington especially felt Nedzi had been "co-opted" by his service as chairman of the subcommittee on intelligence. He asked, "How could he investigate himself?" The party ratio on the committee upset Rhodes and the other Republicans. Nevertheless, Rhodes appointed three ideologically conservative and strong supporters of the IC and the White House to the committee. The 7-to-3 ideological division represented a broad spectrum of political thought from Dellums on the left to Republican Robert McClory on the right.
  
• 2/21/1975 (Miami, Fla.) Three days after announcing he intends to return to Cuba to challenge Castro to an election, liberal leader Luciano Nieves is gunned down in a hospital parking lot after visiting his sick son.
  
• 2/21/1975 John Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman are sentenced for their roles in Watergate.
  
• 2/22/1975 NYT: "J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to the State Department in 1960 raising the possibility that an impostor might be using the credentials of an American defector named Lee Harvey Oswald, who was then in the Soviet Union. This memo from the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and two subsequent State Department memos related to it were apparently not shown to key investigators of the Warren Commission..."
  
• 2/24/1975 Mae Brussell interviewed Penn Jones Jr. on her radio show. She expressed optimism that with the advent of new media, the truth about the JFK assassination would soon come out. Jones was more pessimistic. He gave the opinion that the military was somehow behind the assassination.
  
• 2/27/1975 A House subcommittee reported that J. Edgar Hoover had collected improper material on various people that was used by JFK, LBJ and Nixon.
  
• 2/27/1975 From Daniel Schorr's "Staying Tuned" book: "On February 27, 1975, my long-standing request for another meeting with Director Colby came through. Over coffee we discussed Watergate and Operation Chaos, the domestic surveillance operation. As casually as I could, I then asked, "Are you people involved in assassinations?" "Not any more," Colby said. He explained that all planning for assassinations had been banned since the 1973 inspector general's report on the subject. I asked, without expecting an answer, who had been the targets before 1973. "I can't talk about it," Colby replied. "Hammarskjold?" I ventured. (The UN. secretary-general killed in an airplane crash in Africa.) "Of course not." "Lumumba?" (The left-wing leader in the Belgian Congo who had been killed in 1961, supposedly by his Katanga rivals.) "I can't go down a list with you. Sorry." I returned to my office, my head swimming with names of dead foreign leaders who may have offended the American government. It was frustrating to be this close to one of the major stories of my career and not be able to get my hands on it. After a few days I decided I knew enough to go on the air even without the identity of corpses. Because of President Ford's imprecision, I didn't realize that he was not referring to actual assassinations, but assassination conspiracies. All I knew was that assassination had been a weapon in the CIA arsenal until banned in a post-Watergate cleanup and that the president feared that investigation might expose the dark secret. l sat down at my typewriter and wrote, "President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA..."
  
• 2/28/1975 First public revelation that CIA has plotted to assassinate foreign leaders. Daniel Schorr: "The two-minute "tell" story ran on the Evening News on February 28. While I had been mistaken in suggesting actual murders, my report opened up one of the darkest secrets in the CIA's history."
  
• 3/1975 A 58-month economic expansion in the US begins, lasting until 1/1980. Economy grows 6.1% in first year, 3.3% in second year.
  
• 3/1975 The Shah of Iran met with Vice-President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Shah cut off his aid to Iraq's Kurds; the next day the Iraqis launched a huge offensive against them. The Kurds appealed in desperation to the CIA and Kissinger for aid, but received no response. By the end of the month their forces had been defeated, and several hundred Kurdish leaders were executed. Over 200,000 refugees escaped into Iran. The US and Iran refused to aid them in any way. Kissinger told the Pike Committee: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work." (NYT, Safire 2/12/1976, Pike Report)
  
• 3/1/1975 Science magazine predicted the possibility of "the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age."
  
• 3/5/1975 Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin Bailar issues an order prohibiting the CIA from having access to the mail without authorization.
  
• 3/6/1975 The Zapruder film is shown to the US public for the first time on Geraldo Rivera's "Goodnight America" program; Robert Groden and Dick Gregory appear on the show. Gregory says that he thinks Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were two of the tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza. A group of students from the University of Virginia, including Andy Purdy and Mike Holm, see the program on television. They subsequently get in touch with the Virginia Congressional Delegation, and at 9:15 A.M., April 15, 1975, the Grodens show the film and other evidence at the Capitol to the Virginia Congressional Delegation. This will be the first time any Congressional group has ever seen the Zapruder film, or any of the other assassination film footage or slides.
  
• 3/7/1975 The Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.
  
• 3/8/1975 Crewdson, John M. - "Rockefeller Unit Said to Check Report of CIA Link to Kennedy Assassination" - New York Times
  
• 3/10/1975 Seymour Hersh reported on CIA-Mafia attempts to kill Castro. (NY Times) This story would trigger the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate. New York Times - "CIA Involvement Is Alleged in Plots to Kill 3 Dictators" - 3/10/1975
  
• 3/10/1975 Bill Moyers recalled that LBJ at times "personally feared J Edgar Hoover" but he "learned to use Hoover even as Hoover was using him..." Johnson also "was given to fits of uncontrollable suspicion, once lashing two of his aides for being as 'naive as newborn calves' about the Kennedys, Communists and the New York Times; that he sometimes found gossip about other men's weaknesses a delicious hiatus from work...from these grew some of our worst excesses..." Moyers also claimed that MLK was spied on only because LBJ wanted to know if he was involved with Communists. (Newsweek)
  
• 3/10/1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Turkish Foreign Minister, "Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that." He then explained how he would facilitate the illegal circumvention of a Congressional arms embargo.
  
• 3/11/1975 Commission on Civil Rights study showed that southern schools were more integrated than northern schools.
  
• 3/12/1975 Maurice Stans pleads guilty to charges that he violated federal campaign laws.
  
• 3/12/1975 In Paris, doctors tell Jackie Onassis that Aristotle Onassis is in no immediate danger of dying and that she can fly to New York for a few days to see her children.
  
• 3/14/1975 Frederick C. LaRue is sentenced to six months in prison for his role in Watergate.
  
• 3/15/1975 Aristotle Onassis dies. After his funeral, and for the remainder of this year, Jackie is mostly in America with her children and friends.
  
• 3/17/1975 Supreme Court rules that the federal government, not the states, has the exclusive right to exploit oil and reserves beneath the continental shelf seabed beyond the three-mile territorial limit.
  
• 3/22/1975 Kissinger suspends his efforts to achieve a second Israeli-Egyptian troop disengagement, announcing "irreconcilable differences" between the two countries.
  
• 3/23/1975 John O'Hare dies of a heart attack. According to Cuban exile sources, O'Hare was one of the most dangerous men alive. It is he who is credited with several assassinations, including Manuel Rodriguez Quesada and Gilberto Rodriguez Hernandez. O'Hare is described as a "CIA mercenary and assassin," by Robert Morrow in First Hand Knowledge.
  
• 3/25/1975 White House meeting on Vietnam; present are Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Weyand, and Graham Martin. James Schlesinger was now out of the loop because he disagreed with Kissinger's Vietnam policy. Those present at the meeting agreed to abandon Cambodia, and stop pressing for more US aid to that country. US naval ships would be sent to aid in the evacuation of people fleeing from the Communist advance in Vietnam. Weyand was also to be sent to Saigon on a fact-finding mission.
  
• 3/25/1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is assassinated by his nephew, Prince Raisal ibn Musad, in Riyadh.
  
• 3/27/1975 NYT reported that Haig had quietly flown to the US to meet with Nixon to discuss possible further congressional testimony.
  
• 3/28/1975 Southeast Asia: Ford announces he has ordered US transports to aid evacuation of refugees.
  
• 3/28/1975 Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) wrote to Shlomo Arnon: "The subject of UFOs has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information has been stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret." Goldwater further wrote that there were rumors the evidence would be released, and that he was "just as anxious to see this material as you are, and I hope we will not have to wait much longer."
  
• 3/29/1975 Ford announced in an address to the nation his decision to sign the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, providing for a $23 billion tax cut.
  
• 3/31/1975 Ford's clemency program for Vietnam-era deserters and draft evaders ended, with 22,500 men taking advantage of the opportunity (about 1/6th of those eligible).
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 4/1975 The Rockefeller Commission examines JFK X-rays and autopsy photographs.
  
• 4/1975 Frank McCulloch, managing editor of the Sacramento Bee, told Robert Sam Anson that RFK had wanted to make Las Vegas his next organized crime target, and that Nevada would be a test case for the nation on how to handle the mob. (They've Killed the President 11)
  
• 4/1/1975 Cambodia: The strategic riverport city of Neak Luong fell to the Khmer Rouge. Lon Nol fled to exile in Hawaii, leaving govt in hands of PM Long Boret. It became clear that the war was lost, and foreign embassies began packing up to leave.
  
• 4/1/1975 Americans were ordered to evacuate from Nha Trang. More than a 100 Vietnamese consulate employees were left behind, though they had been promised they wouldn't be abandoned. ARVN troops began looting and sacking the city. Today the communists captured the city. They first defeated the forces at Duc My, where the camp commander fled with the entire payroll for Ranger force; he made it to Saigon and bribed his way aboard a US Air Force flight. The men he left behind fought bravely until 4/2. When Nha Trang fell, the South Vietnamese currency, the piaster, lost 80% of its value. Qui Nhon, the capital of Binh Dinh province, was simply abandoned to the Communists. About half of the 10,000 man division, fully equipped for a fight, fled by sea.
  
• 4/1/1975 Another provincial capital, Tuy Hoa, also fell today. Giap tells a meeting in Hanoi that victory against Saigon is possible. The Viet Cong issued a ten-point Policy of Treatment for the People, assuring the "liberated" populace that the military would protect them. Saigon: PM Tran Thien Khiem tells Thieu he intends to resign. The US Embassy has still not helped Americans or their dependents obtain visas to leave, warn businessmen in any way about their investments in South Vietnam, cut back its staff, or prepare contingency plans for evacuation. A rosy picture of the situation was still being painted for those who asked.
  
• 4/2/1975 A three-day National Conference on Indian Water Rights is convened today in Washington,D.C. Representatives from almost 200 tribes will attend the meeting.
  
• 4/2/1975 South Vietnamese PM Khiem resigns. First refugees reach Saigon, but the government bars entrance to the city.
  
• 4/2/1975 Cam Ranh Bay falls to the communists. Thieu met with Weyand, Martin and Gen. Cao Van Vien. Thieu was angry at the Americans, and pulled out a letter that Nixon had sent him just before the Paris Peace Accords were signed. It promised US retaliation if the Communists broke the truce. Weyand argued that Nixon was no longer president, and he could not expect to get US air raids. Thieu raged that Kissinger had sold his country down the river.
  
• 4/3/1975 PM Khiem made a last public appeal over the radio for soldiers to keep fighting. Dalat abandoned by Saigon army before the communists were even near the city. Saigon archbishop calls for Thieu's ouster. Polish ambassador says that North Vietnam still favors negotiating an end to the war. The docks of Cam Ranh Bay are stacked with the bodies of children who died in the ocean, floating south trying to flee the fighting. Troops and civilians were already panickly evacuating the city.
  
• 4/3/1975 Reporters asked Ford whether he still had faith in the conclusions of the Warren Commission; he replied, "We said that the commission had found no evidence of a conspiracy...Those words were very carefully drafted. And so far I have seen no evidence that would dispute the conclusions to which we came."
  
• 4/4/1975 US unemployment rate at 8.7% (8 million out of work), the highest point since 1941. Ford will recommend extension of unemployment compensation benefits.
  
• 4/4/1975 Saigon: tonight, Thieu made another crackdown on his political opponents anyone suspected of plotting his overthrow. Before leaving, Weyand told Thieu that his army had to stand and fight somewhere, or Congress would not supply any more aid. Also tonight, Thieu went on TV and radio to accept PM Khiem's resignation; he also blamed the Americans and the press for the dire situation.
  
• 4/5/1975 (Saturday) AP reported that Washington was studying plans for evacuating as many as a million people from South Vietnam. US bankers leave Vietnam. Gen. Weyand arrived back in the US. He told Ford that if Congress approved a large military aid package, South Vietnam might hold.
  
• 4/5/1975 Chiang Kai-shek died.
  
• 4/6/1975 (Sunday) Ford was shown photos of the evacuations and chaos in South Vietnam, and was greatly disturbed by them. At the same time, Kissinger told press spokesman Ron Nessen, "Why don't these people [the South Vietnamese] die fast? The worst thing that could happen would be for them to linger on."
  
• 4/7/1975 Le Duc Tho arrives at Communist HQ in Locninh to head final offensive.
  
• 4/7/1975 McGeorge Bundy, in his first day of Rockefeller Commission testimony, categorically denies any knowledge of "an actual decision" to assassinate a foreign leader. He also testifies that he has "no recollection" of an executive action program. Bundy will have a secret meeting with David W. Belin, the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission, tomorrow in order to make some private additions to the record. Bundy must be aware that he has committed perjury and now tries to backtrack. Belin is angered by Bundy's testimony before the Commission.
  
• 4/8/1975 Saigon is nearly surrounded by approx. ten full-strength Communist divisions. First Lt. Nguyen Thanh Trung of the South Vietnamese Air Force took off from Bien Hoa in his F-5E fighter-bomber and headed for Saigon. He dropped two bombs on the presidential palace and strafed some fuel dumps. He then defected to the Communists, where he was put in charge of a squadron of captured US jets. Thieu was not in the palace at the time of the attack. The senior US publicity man in Saigon, Alan Carter, chief of the US Information Service station, would later say he didn't realize Saigon was in trouble until today. Ambassador Martin would continue to act as though nothing was amiss, though, and today a correspondent referred to him as "madman Martin." An embassy staffer said he believed Martin wanted to "go down with the ship. If Vietnam falls, Martin wants to go with it."
  
• 4/9/1975 Time-LIFE sells the Zapruder film to the family for $1; the media is still reporting that Zapruder got only $25,000 for the film; his heirs have complained of dozens of copyright violations; the heirs would not let Time Inc. give the original film to the National Archives, although copies will go there; the heirs' lawyer said the family would "create a liberal policy of making the film available to scholars or the public in a manner consistent with their copyright interest." (Detroit Free Press) Time Inc. assigned the film's copyright to the Zapruder family, for $1. It donated a first generation copy, a second generation copy, and a set of transparencies to the National Archives the same day. It is restricted to viewing on the premises. The original film is stored as a courtesy by the National Archives, without public access to it. An archivist notes that the LIFE first generation copy was of poor quality. The archives now have an FBI second-generation print, the original, one first generation and one second-generation copy from LIFE. The whereabouts of the two Secret Service first generation copies are unknown.
  
• 4/9/1975 Panic begins to spread in Saigon as people realize the reality of the situation. Battle of Xuon Loc (aka Kuon Loc, pronounced "Shuan lawp"), a province capital 36 miles east of Saigon, begins. A heavy North Vietnamese artillery attack began early in the morning. The defenders included a regiment of the 18th Division, once considered the worst in the entire army. Under a new commander, Gen. Le Minh Dao, the 18th began to shape up and fought harder and longer than any other in the defense of South Vietnam.
  
• 4/10/1975 Defenders in Xuan Loc hold out valiantly against the North Vietnamese. Lt. Gen. Nguyen Vinh Nghi arrives at Phan Rang, after scraping together whatever men he could find, to defend the city (which was Thieu's hometown). Ford asked Congress for $722 million to aid the collapsing South Vietnamese government, plus $250 in economic aid. The first US jet carrying increased military aid arrives in Saigon.
  
• 4/11/1975 Elite paratroopers are helicoptered into Xuan Loc from Saigon, but are quickly ambushed and scattered by the North Vietnamese. Today, Ambassador Martin told a TV interviewer that South Vietnam was becoming a self-sufficient country.
  
• 4/11-13/1975 embassy personnel in Cambodia are removed; the ambassador, John Gunther Dean, left 4/12, as did acting president Saukham Khoy. They were removed by helicopter, along with a handful of Cambodians. 40 journalists were also evacuated; 3 chose to remain behind.
  
• 4/12/1975 The Communists again tried to enter Xuan Loc, but failed to do so. Saigon proclaimed this as a victory and set up a press visit.
  
• 4/12/1975 Foreigners are evacuated from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, including Reader's Digest roving reporter Anthony Paul.
  
• 4/13/1975 Correspondents and photographers went into Xuan Loc, a shattered city, though its defenders were still stubbornly holding out.
  
• 4/14/1975 Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover's lifelong companion, dies today. He is seventy-four years old.
  
• 4/14/1975 During his trial, John Connally denied ever asking for or receiving money for urging Nixon to raise milk-price supports. Lady Bird Johnson and Billy Graham were called as character witnesses by the defense.
  
• 4/14/1975 Thieu swears in his "fighting administration" in Saigon. Xuan Loc continues to beat back Communist attacks. US completes airlift of homeless children from South Vietnam to the US; about 14,000 were evacuated. Tonight, A lucky artillery shot hit the ammo dump at Bien Hoa, destroying it with a blast heard and felt in Saigon.
  
• 4/15/1975 Department of Defense, Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) Expands Operations and Facilities, April 15, 1975: This heavily excised Intelligence Report from the Defense Attache in Santiago Chile, describes the growth of DINA, the national intelligence arm of the Chilean government and "the sole responsible agency for internal subversive matters." Many of the excised portions provide details about the strained relations between DINA and the Chilean Armed Forces because of DINA's exclusive power. The report states that the head of DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, "has reported exclusively to, and received orders only from, President Pinochet."
  
• 4/15/1975 Robert Groden shows the Zapruder film and other evidence at the Capitol to the Virginia Congressional Delegation. This is the first time any Congressional group has ever seen the film, or any of the other assassination film footage or slides. Two days from now, Representative Thomas Downing will introduce a resolution to reopen the case. This resolution is then coupled with that of Congressman Gonzales and leads to the eventual creation of the Committee.
  
• 4/15/1975 Cyril Wecht was also instrumental in eliciting evidence that the panelists had had a predisposition. On April 15, 1975, Robert Olsen wrote a memo to file concerning his own telephone conversation with Wecht on that date. In it, he noted that Wecht had asked, "whether the Commission would be getting access to the following items which have not been to date made available for examination since the autopsy." Namely, (1) JFK's brain, (2) Kodachrome slides of the interior of the President's chest, and (3) Microscopic slides of tissue taken from various parts of the President's body, especially those related to wound areas. Three days later, the Warren Commission counsel who had "removed himself" from the Kennedy aspect of the probe, David Belin, and Senior Counsel Robert Olsen sat down with their experts for what an internal memo called a "Panel of Consultants Meeting." The purpose was to review the evidence: JFK's autopsy photographs and X-rays, relevant Zapruder film frames, JFK's clothing, the bullet fragments, etc. Belin/Olsen asked the panelists to respond to a list of 14 written questions. Among them, whether examining the missing evidence that Wecht had specified JFK's brain, tissue slides, and chest photographs was "necessary to arrive at a reliable judgement concerning the number of shots which hit the President or the angles from which they were fired." What was left unasked in the Commission's 14 questions is only slightly more instructive than the panelists' responses. By way of background, in a 1972 New York Times interview Cyril Wecht had first made public the fact that JFK's brain, tissue slides and chest photographs were missing. Never were the medical authorities ever asked whether there was any value in solving the mystery of the missing material. Belin and Olsen only wanted to know whether the experts could get along without it. The panelists' responses gave Wecht's suspicions about their impartiality a boost. Typical of all the responses was that of Werner U. Spitz: "I do not believe that an examination of the President's brain would contribute significantly to a clarification of the circumstances [of the murder];" and, "Microscopic examination of skin slides from the bullet wounds would not, in my opinion, have added pertinent data." Though highly respected for his expertise in these matters, was Spitz really right there was no significant value, or pertinent data, to be found in JFK's brain or skin slides? Wecht has persuasively argued otherwise.
  
• 4/15/1975 Vietnam: Communist artillery began pounding Bien Hoa, making one of the runways unusable. Much of the Saigon air force was at the base, and now found itself grounded. About 8000 North Vietnamese attacked a regiment outside Xuan Loc and destroyed it. Gen. Le Minh Dao and his remaining men in the city fought on, now surrounded by four Communist divisions. Ambassador Martin wrote a candid cable to Kissinger on the situation in Vietnam.
  
• 4/15/1975 Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge overran Phonm Penh's last defense, at Takhmau. The mood in the city was relatively calm; there was no panic, as most citizens expected a Khmer Rouge victory to be no worse than Lon Nol's regime.
  
• 4/16/1975 Ford invokes the Railway Labor Act to avert a nationwide railroad strike.
  
• 4/16/1975 Ford said: "I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance...the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today." Ambassador Martin, under heavy criticism, ordered his security chief to update the contingency plans for evacuation. Thieu is in deep depression as his regime began to collapse around him. Phan Rang falls to the Communists. One of those taken prisoner is a CIA officer, James Lewis. Gen. Nguyen Vinh Nghi is also captured. Tonight, Ford told newsmen that he was ordering Martin to speed up evacuation immediately.
  
• 4/16/1975 Khmer Rouge captures the airport at Phnom Penh. The Cambodian government cabled an offer to Sihanouk in Peking for an immediate ceasefire, offering to turn power over to him. He rejected the offer the next day.
  
• 4/17/1975 John Connally was acquitted of bribery charges by a federal jury.
  
• 4/17/1975 Congressman Downing introduced a resolution calling for a new investigation into JFK's death.
  
• 4/17/1975 US Senate rejected Ford's request for $722 million emergency aid for Saigon.
  
• 4/17/1975 President Thieu is told that his family ancestral graves outside Phan Rang had been bulldozed by Marines and Rangers as they fled the city. Thieu was shattered by the news, and became even more withdrawn and irrational than before.
  
• 4/17/1975 6am The communist rocket attacks on Phnom Penh cease. 7am Khmer Rouge troops enter Phnom Penh. They were surprised to find the city so low on food and military supplies; this was primarily because US aid to Phnom Penh was never very extensive. There was less than one week's supply of rice for the city's 3 million or so people. Most of the population, swelled by refugees from the countryside, greets the victorious troops enthusiastically. This is the beginning of the "Year Zero," as the Communists being emptying the cities of people and forcing them to work in the fields. The people of Phnom Penh had never been sympathetic to the rebels during the war, and now they were to be punished. Police and military figures, as well as the political and bureaucratic elite, were quickly executed. They collected all weapons owned by citizens. Hospitals were emptied, the wounded and sick forced out into the streets. Khmer Rouge units fanned out into the neighborhoods and told people to evacuate because the Americans would soon be bombing the city. Immediately, all trade and private enterprise were abolished; all markets were closed, every shop and restaurant; money was abolished. There were only three occupations: soldier, worker, peasant. The state claimed absolute control over every facet of life; the people's lives were to be filled with work and little else no recreation or entertainment, religion, travel, reading, writing, etc. The work day would last 14 to 16 hours. Sex and romance outside of marriage were outlawed. The new regime cut itself off from the world, with only minimal contacts maintained with Peking and Hanoi. The first stories about the secretive new regime came from refugees who fled to Thailand; these stories seemed to fantastic to be true. They told of people being killed because they wore eyeglassess, and therefore must be intellectuals.
  
• 4/17/1975 Kissinger cabled Ambassador Martin, "We have just completed an interagency review of the state of play in South Vietnam. You should know that at the WSAG meeting today there was almost no support for the evacuation of Vietnamese, and for the use of American force to help protect any evacuation. The sentiment of our military, DOD and CIA colleagues was to get out fast and now…" Americans at the Saigon embassy are now working quickly on evacuation plans, though Ambassador Martin is not being cooperative. The Chief of the US Information Service, Alan Carter, appeared on South Vietnamese television in an interview to assure the Vietnamese that the US wasn't abandoning them.
  
• 4/18/1975 The remaining charges against Connally were dropped by Judge George L. Hart Jr.
  
• 4/18/1975 The first probe in the final battle for Saigon occurred as a small group of communist guerillas attacked the Phu Lam signal site on the western edge of the capital. Martin urges Thieu to remain in office, while the French urge him to resign.
  
• 4/19/1975 Bicentennial reenactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord; Ford appeared and was booed by 20,000 demonstrators when he announced that the US "stands in the front lines of the free world."
  
• 4/19/1975 The Viet Cong announced it would negotiate with a regime in Saigon that did not include President Thieu. Five Saigon generals are arrested for failure to fight.
  
• 4/20/1975 Thieu is in his bomb shelter under Independence Palace, avoiding everyone. "Although he had thought the previous week he might head out to the luxurious riverside weekend retreat he had built just north of Saigon, other things had intruded." (55 Days p283)
  
• 4/21/1975 It is revealed that Nixon has nearly recovered from his phlebitis and surgery.
  
• 4/21/1975 The defenders of Xuan Loc are forced to withdraw. 8pm President Thieu resigned in a long, rambling, emotional television address. "Kissinger did not see that the Paris Peace Accords led the South Vietnamese people to death. Everyone sees it and Kissinger does not see it." He urged his people to fight on. The huge communist army surrounding Saigon sat and waited for the next several days. Vice-president Huong takes over.
  
• 4/22/1975 US evacuation of South Vietnam slows as Embassy claims shortage of aircraft. Hanoi Radio announces it will not negotiate with Huong.
  
• 4/23/1975 Ford declares that the war in Vietnam is "finished as far as America is concerned." The Saigon air force pulled out of Bien Hoa. US abandons its consulate at Bien Hoa, leaving the US flag flying.
  
• 4/23/1975 Pol Pot arrives in Phnom Penh without parade or fanfare, not even a public announcement.
  
• 4/24/1975 Financier C. Arnholt Smith was fined $10,000 for his conviction on two counts of making illegal contributions to Sen. George Murphy's 1970 campaign.
  
• 4/24/1975 Columnist Marianne Means wrote that LBJ told her a year before he died that he thought Oswald had acted alone, but was "either under the influence or the orders" of Castro. He had sworn Means to secrecy, but she was now telling her story "because Johnson's opinion appears to debunk the current speculation that the Central Intelligence Agency might somehow have been involved in the Kennedy assassination."
  
• 4/24/1975 Former Warren Commission staffer Burt Griffin was quoted in Rolling Stone: "I don't think some agences were candid with us. I never thought the Dallas police were telling us the entire truth. Neither was the FBI."
  
• 4/25/1975 Ford urges Congress to extend the General Revenue Sharing program.
  
• 4/25/1975 Nguyen Cao Ky addressed a large crowd of rightists in Saigon, and spoke of leading the defense of Saigon himself. There would be no surrender, he insisted. Meanwhile, Thieu and his wife had packed their belongings and made arrangements to get out of the country. Mrs. Thieu had managed to get hold of 16 tons of gold from the Bank of Vietnam.
  
• 4/25/1975 Robert Healey, Executive Editor of the Boston Globe, after seeing the Zapruder film, published an editorial in which he stated: "The visual presentation is far more convincing than all the books and all the magazine articles that have ever been advanced. They make a simple and convincing case that President Kennedy had to be killed by bullets fired from two directions...and no words can make the case better than the Zapruder film." ("Time to Reopen the Dallas Files," 4/25/1975)
  
• 4/25 or 4/24/1975 Walter Cronkite aired interview footage with LBJ, shot 9/1969, as he speculated about a possible conspiracy in the JFK assassination
  
• 4/26/1975 AFL-CIO-sponsored rally in Washington draws 60,000.
  
• 4/26/1975 Saigon: president Huong said publicly that he would step down if the National Assembly agreed on a successor. The Thieus flew to Taiwan secretly aboard a US Air Force C118.
  
• 4/27/1975 (Sunday) Vietnam: Communist artillery began to be fired into Saigon. At Long Thanh, 20 miles east of Saigon, one of the fiercest tank attacks of the war overran the ARVN tank base. Minh told ambassador Martin he wanted the remaining US military personnel out of Vietnam immediately. Saigon National Assembly votes 134-0 to hand power over to Minh.
  
• 4/28/1975 (Monday) McCord's sentence was reduced to four months in prison by Sirica; he gave no reason for doing this.
  
• 4/28/1975 Ford announced in a speech that he sought de-regulation of business.
  
• 4/28/1975 More rocket attacks on Saigon. 140,000 North Vietnamese are ranged around the city. The capitol has 60,000 defenders. In the words of reporter David Butler, this is the day "when the door slammed shut on what was to have been the American Century." Gen. Duong Van Minh takes power in Saigon, but had not publicly announced his decision to negotiate with the Communists. 35 minutes after his swearing-in speech, North Vietnaemese pilots in captured US planes, led by defector Nguyen Thanh Trung, attacked Tan Son Nhut airport, less than four miles from the Marines statue. This was the Communists' first air raid of the war. Panic swept through Saigon. An artillery barrage at Tan Son Nhut killed two US Marines, Darwin Judge and William McMahon. Vietnam: CIA chief Thomas Polgar and Maj. Gen. Homer Smith angrily told Martin it was time for the final evacuation. The tree behind the embassy, sitting where the big helicopters would have to land (since the airport was now closed) would have to be cut down immediately. Martin refused to hear any of it, insisting that airplanes could still land at the airport. Polgar told Martin to go to Tan Son Nhut to see the situation for himself. Martin agreed, and as he was leaving, Polgar had some Marine guards cut the tree down. By 10am, Martin had come back to the embassy, realizing that the airbase was no longer usable.
  
• 4/28/1975 Richard Helms, after an appearance before the Rockefeller Commission, was pressed by reporter Daniel Schorr about his exact knowledge of CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. The normally unflappable Helms exploded, shouting, "Killer Schorr! Killer Schorr!" and hurled numerous profanities at him as he left the hearings. The NYT and Post did not quote all the sexual obscenities Helms used. When asked about LBJ's comments that Kennedy might have been killed in retaliation for anti-Castro plots, Helms said, "I don't know why President Johnson said these things." Daniel Schorr, from his book Staying Tuned: "President Ford moved swiftly to head off a searching congressional investigation by extending the term of the Rockefeller commission and adding the assassination issue to its agenda. The commission hastily scheduled a new series of secret hearings in the vice president's suite in the White House annex. Richard Helms, who had already testified once, was called home again from his ambassador's post in Tehran for two days of questioning by the commission's staff and four hours before the commission on April 28. I waited with colleagues and staked-out cameras outside the hearing room, the practice being to ask witnesses to make remarks on leaving. As Helms emerged, I extended my hand in greeting, with a jocular "Welcome back'." I was forgetting that I was the proximate reason for his being back. His face ashen from fatigue and strain, he turned livid. "You son of a bitch," he raged. "You killer, you cocksucker Killer Schorr - that's what they ought to call you!" He then strode before the cameras and gave a toned-down version of his tirade. "I must say, Mr. Schorr, I didn't like what you had to say in some of your broadcasts on this subject. As far as I know, the CIA was never responsible for assassinating any foreign leader." "Were there discussions of possible assassinations?" I asked. Helms began losing his temper again. "I don't know when I stopped beating my wife, or you stopped beating your wife. Talk about discussions in government? There are always discussions about practically everything under the sun!" I pursued Helms down the corridor and explained to him the presidential indiscretion that had led me to report "assassinations." Calmer now, he apologized for his outburst and we shook hands. But because other reporters had been present, the story of his tirade was in the papers the next day."
  
• 4/29/1975 North Vietnamese troops move into the outskirts of Saigon. Massive helicopter evactuation removes most of the last embassy personnel while thousands of Vietnamese try to get into the embassy grounds. The Americans reach the helipad on the roof of the embassy, locking a heavy door behind them to keep the Vietnamese back. Seven miles northwest of Saigon, at Go Vap, US-made South Vietnamese tanks battled Russian-made North Vietnamese tanks. At 4am North Vietnamese artillery pounds Tan Son Nhut air base. The last US fighter planes scramble to take off. 11:51am Evacuation orders are given. Helicopters from the waiting US armada off the coast head for Saigon. At noon, Saigon announced that Big Minh had ordered the US Embassy to close down. 3pm US airlift of refugees and embassy officials begins. 11:30pm Marines at the air base destroy building and equipment. The last Marines leave the airport shortly after midnight.
  
• 4/29/1975 The three US television networks aired documentaries on the war: Vietnam: A War that is Finished; Special Report Seven Thousand, Three Hundred Eighty-Two Days in Vietnam and Vietnam: Lessons Learned, Prices Paid.
  
• 4/30/1975 3:15 am Ambassador Martin receives a message from the Secretary of Defense to get all Americans out of Saigon within half an hour. 4:42am Ambassador Martin and the last of his staff board a helicopter on the embassy roof. Martin had pleaded with Kissinger to keep the evacuation going, but Kissinger told him, "Now Graham, we want all our heroes at home." 5:10am two hundred Americans take two hours to make it from the ground floor to the embassy roof, fighting off panicking refugees and trying to block doors, stairwells and elevator shafts behind them. 6:30am Communist troops overran the 8th Precinct police headquarters. Defending forces were quickly being pushed back. 7:53 am Vietnam: The last helicopters came to the US embassy in Saigon to pick up the remaining Marines, who threw tear gas canisters at the crowds in the yard trying to get aboard. 9am By this time, South Vietnamese who had collaborated with the Americans, and expected to be evacuated, now realized that no help was coming. Soldiers and officers changed into civilian clothes. Police abandoned their posts, and looting began. 10:20am Minh went on Radio Saigon and called on the military to surrender to prevent the city from being attacked. The communists found the city loaded with food, supplies, and military equipment from the US. 12:45pm A 20-year-old female guerrilla, Nguyen Trung Kien, raised the communist flag over the presidential palace.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1975 US unemployment reaches post-war high of 9.2%.
  
• 5/1/1975 Communist forces secure control of Saigon.
  
• 5/1/1975 A SKELETON KEY TO THE GEMSTONE FILES is published by Bruce Porter Roberts.
  
• 5/2/1975 Saigon: the first Communist May Day celebrations are held here. Viet Cong flags are raised all over the city. Some fighting continues in the Mekong Delta. Communications with outside world are cut in Saigon.
  
• 5/3/1975 The communists proclaimed all of Vietnam under their control. Fighting begins between the new governments of Vietnam and Cambodia, over the border regions and offshore islands.
  
• 5/5/1975 Ford asks Congress for money to resettle over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees; the House would reject the bill and Ford would describe himself as "damned mad" about that decision.
  
• 5/5/1975 Not the sort of doctor to take his medicine lying down, Wecht went into action. He and two other well-respected forensic authorities [Dr. Robert Joling, then the President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and Herbert L. MacDonnell, Professor of Criminalistics, Elmira College] publicly charged that, "the Commission has set up a panel of governmental sycophants to defend the Warren Report." In a May 5, 1975 press release, Wecht charged that "all the members of the panel appointed by the Rockefeller Commission have strong ties to the federal government and close professional relationships with individuals who have formerly participated in studies defending the Warren Report." Wecht emphasized Belin's Warren Commission roots. Wecht also charged that, "The (medical) panel itself is made up of people who have been associated with the Baltimore Medical Examiner's Office, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Department of Radiology, and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, three facilities which either supplied the members of the original autopsy team or from which selected members of a previous panel had been appointed by the Justice Department in 1968 to defend the Warren Report." Wecht's unrestrained assertions were not without foundation. Rockefeller appointee Werner U. Spitz, MD, the Detroit Medical Examiner, was a close professional colleague of one of the Clark Panel members, Baltimore Medical Examiner Russell Fisher, MD, under whom Spitz had served for several years. Richard Lindenberg, MD, a Baltimore-based, State of Maryland neuropathologist, was described in a once-secret Commission memo as having provided "consultation to the Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland [Russell Fisher] but is subordinate to him." Panelist Fred Hodges, MD, a neuroradiologist, was picked from Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, the institution that had contributed Russell Morgan, MD, the radiologist who had made the X-ray mistakes discussed above as a Clark Panelist. Pathologist Lt. Col. Robert R. McMeeken, MC was appointed from Pierre Finck's alma mater, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The Warren Commission consultant who had failed to note the marked discrepancies between the test skulls he shot up and JFK's skull, Dr. Alfred Olivier, completed Rockefeller's team of independent and impartial consultants.
  
• 5/7/1975 Ford declared the end "of the Vietnam Era" and urged Americans "to close ranks, to avoid recrimations about the past." He also signed a proclamation terminating veterans' wartime benefits.
  
• 5/8/1975 The Khmer Rouge is reported to be uprooting millions of people in its efforts to de-urbanize the country.
  
• 5/10/1975 David Atlee Phillips, shortly after being awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA's highest honor, announces he is taking early retirement from the CIA to start an association of former intelligence officials to lead a public campaign against critics of the Agency. (Fonzi chronology) This year, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers is formed. Clare Boothe Luce is on the Board of Directors. This organization is formed as an "independent" voice to defend the CIA against its critics. Its founder is the retired intelligence officer who, as the Agency's top psych-warfare expert, was instrumental in the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala; was the CIA's propaganda chief for the Bay of Pigs operation; and was eventually promoted to Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, a post representing the highest rung on the Agency's career chart.
  
• 5/10/1975 Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the development of a comprehensive busing plan for Boston's public schools.
  
• 5/11/1975 50,000 people gather in NYC's Central Park to celebrate the end of the Vietnam war.
  
• 5/11/1975 Los Angeles Times story by former WC staffers W. David Slawson and Richard M Mosk: "There were always those who believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and many of these persons brushed aside the report of the Warren Commission which found no evidence to support the conspiracy theory and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Recently, talk of plots to assassinate foreign leaders, and investigations into what role, if any, the American CIA may have had in such plots, has revived speculation over the Kennedy assassination. The conspiracy theory persists partly because some persons find it difficult to believe that such a momentous act could be done so capriciously, and by such an insignificant, hapless man as Lee Harvey Oswald. Few persons not familiar with the Warren Report realize the large number of chance occurrences underlying the action. It is very unlikely that Oswald would ever have killed Kennedy had the President not gone to Dallas when he did and passed the building in which Oswald was working...The night before the assassination, Oswald hitched a ride with a friend out to a suburb to see his wife, Marina, from whom he was then separated. He begged her to come back and live with him. He offered to rent an apartment in Dallas for the them the next day. She refused. The next morning Oswald left his wedding ring and almost all his money on the dresser, and departed with the same friend for work, with the rifle dismantled and concealed in a package. Kennedy might be alive today had Marina relented. Allegations concerning CIA activities in the late 1950s and the 1960s have created added doubts, because the CIA assisted the commission in its investigation. However, the CIA was only one such outside source of assistance, and it was not the most important one. (The most important was the FBI.) Moreover, the commission double-checked and cross-checked all significant information among a variety of sources - governmental and private. The principal reason for the criticisms and conspiracy theories, however, is the breadth of the Warren Report. The published materials comprise 27 volumes. The National Archives contains additional material, which has for the most part been made public. Critics of the report, by selective and inaccurate citations have turned this vast amount of material against the commission...X-rays, photographs and the autopsy show that the bullet came from the area where Oswald was located...Finally, he lied about a number of facts during his interrogation. Thus, the claims that the rifle was inaccurate, that the shot was difficult, that Oswald was a poor shot and that stress analysis tests of Oswald s voice allegedly show him to have been telling the truth when he denied his guilt are all unpersuasive in light of so much uncontroverted evidence. These claims, even in isolations are misleading: Oswald was a former Marine and hunter. He practiced with the rifle when he was a civilian. Tests showed that his rifle was sufficiently accurate. The shot was not particularly difficult. It was from a stable, prepared position at a target moving 1l m.p.h. almost straight away at a range to 266 feet. The rifle had a telescopic sight. The voice stress analysis has not achieved general acceptance as a reliable lie detector test...Since the time interval is that between the two shots which hit, Oswald had all the time he needed to fire the first shot...The evidence concerning the wounds conclusively dispels the idea of shots from the front, another part of the theory. The wounds both slanted downward from Kennedy's back. This is clear beyond doubt from the autopsy and from the photographs and X-rays of the body. The photographs and X-rays are still not open to public view, because of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' wishes...The inward pointing of the threads of the back of Kennedy's clothing and the outward pointing of the threads in the front of his clothing demonstrate that the bullet which first hit him entered from the rear and exited from the front. Since the car was in a low underpass, a bullet from any direction would have to have been going downward, and would have hit the car after leaving Kennedy. All the bullet damage to the car was in front of Kennedy, which is consistent with a bullet entering from the rear. A great deal of publicity has been given recently to the claim that Kennedy must have been hit from the front because the Zapruder film shows his head jerking back. In fact, the head jerks back not when the bullet hits it but slightly later. Actually, at the time of the hit, the President's head appears to move slightly forward and the sprayed flesh also moves forward. The jerk, therefore, cannot have been a momentum reaction. It must have been a neural or muscular reaction caused by either bullet or by a reaction to some other stimulus. Many critics have pointed to a rough sketch of the location of the neck wound and to the location of the bullet hole in the President's shirt and suit jacket as proving that the rear wound was lower on the President's body than the wound in front. From this it follows, supposedly that some other gunman must have been firing in a downward direction from the front. But the best evidence of the wound's location are the autopsy records and the photos and X-rays of the body itself. These unambiguously show the rear wounds higher than the wound at the front...The fact that the recovered bullet that apparently through both Kennedy and Connally was not greatly distorted itself actually supports the single-bullet theory. In order that a bullet be recovered without being greatly distorted, it must be brought to a slow and gentle stop. By going through two and by tumbling end over end through flesh and muscle and by glancing off, rather than penetrating large bones, the bullet was brought to a slow and gentle stop and so was able to emerge relatively unscathed condition...We do not believe that a reopening of the inquiry, in the sense of establishing a new commission to carry on its own investigation or to hear argument from private investigators, would serve any useful purpose."
  
• 5/12/1975 Early today, the Khmer Rouge stationed a small marine force on the island of Puolo Wai, in a continuing dispute with Vietnam over who owned it. The Cambodians stopped all foreign vessels in the area. Later in the morning, the US merchant ship Mayaguez, very close to the island of Puolo Wai, was seized by Khmer Rouge gunboats. These gunboats were under the command of the Southwestern Zone army, and the operation was carried out without orders from Phonm Phen. Washington immediately demanded the release of the ship, but it wasn't certain if the demands were heard in Phonm Penh, since the Khmer Rouge had cut themselves off from the world. Even the Chinese claimed they had no way to communicate with the Cambodian government.
  
• 5/13/1975 Three Cambodian patrol boats were destroyed by US aircraft. Probably on this day, the government at Phonm Penh ordered that the Mayaguez be released.
  
• 5/14/1975 Early this morning, Cambodian information minister Hu Nim announced that the Mayaguez would be released. Thirty minutes after his broadcast, US marines landed on Koh Tang Island; 38 Marines die (most in a helicopter crash), with 50 wounded and 3 missing. The marines encountered heavy opposition on Koh Tang from Cambodians who were dug in expecting a Vietnamese attack. While this battle was going on, the Mayaguez and its crew were released unharmed. The US then bombed Kompong Som seaport on the mainland, plus the nearby Ream naval air base. This attack knocked out much of the Cambodian air force and navy, thus leaving the country vulnerable to a future Vietnamese attack, and the Khmer Rouge was forced to give up Puolo Wai. One administration official later admitted, "It wouldn't be a bad thing if the other side goes a step too far in trying to kick us while we're down. It would give us a chance to kick then back hard." (Time 5/26/75)
  
• 5/15/1975 Former Dallas Deputy sheriff Roger Craig dies in Dallas. He is 39 years old. He was a frequent critic of the Warren Commission's version of the Kennedy assassination. Craig is killed by a rifle bullet; his death is listed as suicide.
  
• 5/16/1975 Congress appropriates $405 million to fund a refugee aid program and authorizes resettlement of South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the US. Over 140,000 refugess are flown to the US over the next few months.
  
• 5/16/1975 Dallas Morning News: OSWALD ON PAYROLL? CIA REPORTEDLY TIED WITH MURDER by Earl Golz. Author W.R. Morris of Loretta, Tenn., asserts the assassination was financed by the CIA which paid a Mafia boss to recruit at least three "trigger men: to shoot at Kennedy in a "crossfire." Morris has given the Rockefeller Commission the names of two of the gunmen, one of whom is now dead, and of a man whom he said "organized" the shooting. Most of the information came from a former CIA operative who claimed he had worked with Oswald. Oswald's CIA number was 107 and he was paid $400 a month plus traveling expenses from the time he returned to this country from Russia in June, 1962, Morris said. Morris said he met with the CIA operative early in the morning on Nov. 24, 1966, at Oswald's graveside at Rose Hill Burial Park in Fort Worth. Morris, who had been assigned by the Associated Press to interview people who visited the grave on the third anniversary of Oswald's death, said he surprised the CIA agent as he was placing a vase of yellow mums and a note on the Oswald headstone. The man, whom Morris refuses to publicly identify, has since left the CIA and is now in private law practice in California…Morris, who wrote the popular book, "The Twelfth of August" in 1971 that was made into the movie "Walking Tall," disputed Olsen's comment that his statement was not a sworn affidavit. He said the cover letter was notarized, although "every page wasn't certified."…Morris said the CIA agent was "shocked when he saw me" at Oswald's grave. He pleaded with him not print anything about the incident, but Morris told him he would because the scene was so unusual. However, he didn't identify the man or note any CIA ties, he said. The man was thankful he didn't print a description of him and "later on he and I got to be good friends," Morris said. He showed Morris his CIA credentials and said he was quitting the agency because it was "ruthless and dangerous...and nothing but hired killers on the taxpayers' payroll," Morris said. Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, Oswald's mother, said the same man sends flowers for her son's grave on each anniversary of his death. Kennedy was a CIA target, Morris claims, because he "was in the process of abolishing the CIA. He said the CIA had blundered the Bay of Pigs invasion" of Cuba.
  
• 5/16/1975 Thailand recalls its ambassador to the US, citing sovereignty violation in Mayaguez rescue.
  
• 5/19-20/1975 Kissinger talks with Gromyko in Vienna. 5/20 they agree to cooperate in reopening Geneva talks on the Middle East.
  
• 5/21/1975 William Colby testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee about CIA assassination plots.
  
• 5/22-23/1975 NATO holds its semi-annual talks in Brussels.
  
• 5/23/1975 Lebanon: president Franjieh names a military cabinet in an attempt to restore order.
  
• 5/27/1975 Supreme Court rules that Federal judges do not have the power to block a congressional subpoena issued in connection with an authorized committee investigation.
  
• 5/28-29/1975 Ford attends NATO summit meeting in Brussels. This trip to Europe lasts until 6/3. He also visits Spain, Italy and Austria. In the latter country he met with Egyptian President Sadat.
  
• 5/29/1975 Ford vetoed a $5.3 billion jobs bill passed by Congress.
  
• 5/29/1975 Terry Sanford, president of Duke University, announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 5/30/1975 Rocca/CIA memo to Rockefeller Commission: "[Nelson] Delgado's testimony has the cast of credibility...says a lot more of possible operational significance than is reflected by the language of the Warren Report, and its implications do not appear to have been run down or developed by investigation." The memo says there was minimal cooperation by the Soviets and Cubans in the assassination investigation, "designed to cover up an admission of knowledge of, or connection with, Oswald."
  
• 6/1975 Sens. McGovern, Kennedy, Abourezk, Church, and Humphrey pushed through an amendment that allowed 400 Chilean exiles to enter the US.
  
• 6/1975 During this month, some two months before his death, mobster crony and CIA asset, John Martino, tells News Day reporter, John Cummings, that he himself "played a role" in the JFK assassination. "Two guns, two people [were] involved," Martino reportedly says -- adding that they were anti-Castro Cubans.John Martino is stricken with cancer. With only two months to live, he confides in his business associate and friend, Fred Claasen, as well as Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that it was the Cuban refugees who setup the JFK assassination. Anthony Summers reported in Vanity Fair, that Martino told Cummings that two anti-Castro Cubans were involved in the shooting. Author Mary LaFontaine eventually interviews Cummings who also reports that Martino talked about a woman in Dallas, "who knew a lot of things" about the assassination. According to Mary, Cummings believes that Martino was referring to Silvia Odio. Fred Claasen reports that Martino told him, "The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn't know who he was working for - he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater. They were to meet Oswald in the theater, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake..... There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him." After reporting this information to the HSCA, the skittish Claasen makes himself scarce and can not be tracked down for further questioning. It is also noteworthy, that Martino is never quoted as claiming that Oswald was innocent - only that he was ignorant of who he was working for/with. Martino dies shortly after his conversation with Claasen.
  
• 6/3/1975 Dept of HEW issues new regulations aimed at equalizing opportunities for women in college.
  
• 6/5/1975 The New York Times published details of the "family jewels" and revealed that Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Colby had briefed Rep. Nedzi about them in 1973, when Nedzi was chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. His fellow Democrats on the Nedzi committee, led by Harrington, revolted. Nedzi resigned as chairman of the committee on 12 June 1975.
  
• 6/5/1975 Egypt reopened the Suez Canal after eight years as a gesture of peace, though President Sadat still vows to "liberate" the Sinai, Golan and Palestine from Israel.
  
• 6/6/1975 FBI Report to Chilean Military on Detainee, June 6, 1975: This letter, one of a number sent by FBI attache Robert Scherrer to Chilean General Ernesto Baeza, provides intelligence obtained through the interrogation of a captured Chilean leftist, Jorge Isaac Fuentes. The document records U.S. collaboration with Chile's security forces, including the promise of surveillance of subjects inside the United States. Fuentes was detained through Operation Condor--a network of Chilean, Argentinian and Paraguayan secret police agencies which coordinated tracking, capturing and killing opponents. According to the Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, he was tortured in Paraguay, turned over to the Chilean secret police, and disappeared.
  
• 6/6/1975 US government reports that unemployment peaks at 9.2% in May, a 33-year high.
  
• 6/71/975 US withdraws its last combat aircraft from Taiwan.
  
• 6/9/1975 TIME reported that NY mafia figures James Plumeri and Salvatore Granello had been recruited by the CIA in '60 or '61 to aid in logistical planning of the Bay of Pigs.
  
• 6/10/1975 Rockefeller Commission report presented to Ford. It concluded that the CIA engaged in scores of "plainly unlawful and...improper" activities including domestic break-ins, mail openings, drug experiments, and spying on Americans. It also blamed past presidents for allowing or encouraging the CIA to engage in wrongdoing. It also found "no credible evidence" that the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, though it admitted that its investigation was limited to studying the tramp photos and the possibility of a grassy knoll gunman. The Commission explained the backward movement of Kennedy's head in the Z-film as "a seizure-like neuromuscular reaction to major damage inflicted to nerve centers of the brain."
  
• 6/11-12/1975 Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin talks with Ford and Kissinger in Washington.
  
• 6/12/1975 Nedzi resigned as chairman of the House committee investingating the intelligence community. Rep. Harrington suspected that Nedzi's resignation was simply part of a plot to abolish the Select Committee and prevent a House investigation of the IC and the CIA. Accordingly, on 13 June, with a rump caucus chaired by Representative James Stanton, the Democrats tried to hold a hearing on intelligence with Colby as the first witness. At Nedzi's urging, however, the Republicans refused to attend, thus preventing an official meeting. The committee investigation then ground to a halt.
  
• 6/12/1975 Within days of its June 1975 publication, a crack appeared in the ultra smooth façade of the Rockefeller Commission's report. On June 12th, the New York Times reported that Cyril Wecht had complained that "his views of President Kennedy's murder were distorted by the Rockefeller Commission." In its June 23, 1975 edition, Newsweek Magazine reported that "the flap over the [Rockefeller Commission's] apparent fudging of [Wecht's] views seemed enough to ensure that this report on the JFK assassination, like the ones before it, would fail to lay to rest the suspicions of the conspiratorialists." In published interviews, Wecht proposed a simple way for the government to refute his charges of misrepresentation: he called for "the commission to release a transcript of his statements." "If that transcript shows in any way I have withdrawn or revised my thoughts of the Warren Report," Wecht challenged, "I'll eat the transcript on the steps of the White House." Thereafter, a fascinating and illuminating story unfolded. The Vice President stonewalled, resolutely refusing Wecht's repeated personal requests to see his own interview, a request that, if honored, would scarcely have threatened national security. The famed coroner waited 23 years to be vindicated. Only in 1998 did the JFK Review Board finally send Wecht a copy of his testimony, belatedly bestowing an official confirmation of Rockefeller's chicanery. Wecht wasn't the only respected authority who suffered from Rockefeller's peculiar passion for secrecy. Noted skeptic, Kansas University pathology professor John Nichols, MD, got much the same treatment. When Nichols wrote the Vice President for permission to see the then-secret files from Rockefeller's autopsy review panel, he got a letter from "White House counsel," saying, "These materials from the files of the Commission now belong to the White House, and are under the control of the President. As such, they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and cannot be made available to you."[ White House letter quoted in: Nichols, John. The Wounding of Governor John Connally of Texas, November 22, 1963. Maryland State Medical Journal, October, 1977, p. 62-63.] With less irony than one might have hoped, for all the government's preoccupation with keeping Wecht's testimony and Rockefeller's autopsy investigation secret, it made an exception for a Warren Commission defender. It shared parts of it for use by one Jacob Cohen, a Warren-friendly author who used Wecht's material in an harsh anticonspiracy article published in Commentary Magazine in October 1975.[ Jacob Cohen, Conspiracy Fever. Commentary Magazine, 10/75. In a 12/5/75 letter to Professor Josiah Thompson, Jacob Cohen wrote that "(Rockefeller Commission counsel Robert) Olsen talked to me at length about Wecht's testimony." (Copy of letter made available to the authors by Cyril Wecht.)]
  
• 6/13/1975 Richard Helms told the Church Committee that he didn't tell McCone about the anti-Castro plots because "I was enormously busy with a lot of other things...I guess I must have thought to myself, well this is going to look peculiar to him and I doubt very much this is going to go any place, but if it does, then that is time enough to bring him in the picture...It was a Mafia connection and Mr. McCone was new to the organization and this was, you know, not a very savory effort."
  
• 6/13/1975 The annual inflation rate in England is reported at 25%, the highest in Europe.
  
• 6/15/1975 In a story by Bob Wiedrick, the Chicago Tribune reports that a CIA liaison man has informed Congressional leaders investigating the Agency that "(Kennedy) Presidential aides Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers are reported to have told investigators soon after the Kennedy assassination that they thought they had observed what might have been shots coming from a location other than the Texas School Depository. But sometime before O'Donnell and Powers submitted their report to the Warren commission by deposition and affidavit either J. Edgar Hoover or his top aides prevailed on the men not to disclose their suspicions to the Commission."
  
• 6/15/1975 "Sometime in the mid-1960s - probably in 1965 or 1966 - dissidents in the de Gaulle government are said to have made contact with the CIA to seek help in a plot to murder the French leader...According to the CIA briefing officer, discussions were held on how best to eliminate de Gaulle, who by then had become a thorn in the side of the Johnson Administration because of his ouster of military bases from French soil and his demands that United States forces be withdrawn from the Indochina War...There is, however, no evidence the plot got beyond the talking stage." (Chicago Tribune 6/15/1975)
  
• 6/16/1975 The circus-like atmosphere continued on 16 June, when the House rejected Nedzi's resignation by a vote of 290 to 64. But Nedzi refused to continue as chairman.
  
• 6/16/1975 Italy: Communists win 33.4% of the vote in elections; Christian Democrats win 35.3%.
  
• 6/17/1975 The House abolished Nedzi's Select Committee and voted to establish a new Select Committee with Representative Pike as chairman. The new committee did not differ greatly from the old one. Enlarged to 13 members, the committee, led by Democrats, continued to provide a solid liberal Democratic majority even after it dropped Nedzi and Harrington from membership. Pike also retained Searle Field as chief of staff from the Nedzi Committee and brought in Aaron Donner from New York as his chief counsel. Despite the new start, the committee remained badly divided on ideological grounds. The majority was still hostile toward the CIA and the White House. Pike, like Nedzi, would have no mandate to develop an effective investigation, the expiration date for which was 31 January 1976. Unlike the Church Committee, which had carefully balanced younger staff with Hill professionals and ex-IC members, the Pike Committee had a predominantly young staff with little experience either on the Hill or in the Intelligence Community. This would cause major problems in dealing with the Agency and the White House.
  
• 6/17/1975 The people of the Northern Marianas Islands ratify the pact to become a US commonwealth by a margin of four to one.
  
• 6/19/1975 Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana is shot to death with a .22 caliber pistol a week before his scheduled appearance before the Church Committee. Giancana was shot six times pointblank in his head - in the basement of his Chicago home. (1147 South Wenonah Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois) He is 65. He is slated to tell about CIA-mob assassination plots to the Senate committee. His executioner enters the basement through heavy steel doors that have been opened by Giancana - who is then shot with a .22 revolver pressed against the base of his skull at the back of his head for the first shot. He is then shot in the mouth with five more bullets under the chin into his brain. The .22 revolver is traced by the FBI to the Miami, Florida, territory of Santos Trafficante. (One suspect for the killing is Johnny Roselli.) Sam's brother, Chuck, writes that one week prior to Giancana's murder, Sam Giancana orders the execution of Jimmy Hoffa. At 11 p.m. on the top floor of the house are Sam's caretaker, Joe DiPersio, and his wife. Joe has seen three cars out front. It is suggested that Giancana is being watched by the CIA, the FBI and the Oak Park Police. Normally, when a group in one car goes on a food break, the other two groups continue their silent vigil. At this point, however, all three cars pull off and drive away together. Giancana goes down to the basement to cook a late night snack - sausages and escarole. His executioner shoots Giancana in the back of the neck with a .22 pistol, aiming in an upward direction to the left. Giancana dies almost instantly. The executioner nudges Giancana over onto his back and puts another bullet into the front of his neck; a third entering the lower lip; a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh into the lower jaw and lower face. At 11:52, Joe DiPersio goes downstairs to check on Giancana and finds him dead. An ambulance arrives, picks up the body, and reaches the Oak Park Hospital emergency room at 1:40 a.m. on June 20, 1975. At 1:45 a.m., Sam Giancana is pronounced dead. The three cars - the CIA, FBI and Oak Park Police - return to the house and resume their silent watch.
  
• 6/19/1975 Church Committee staffers arrive in Chicago to accompany Sam Giancana to Washington, DC in order to testify at a hearing.
  
• 6/19/1975 The Chicago Tribune this morning has carried the headline REPORT CIA SCHEME TO POISON CASTRO. The short article states, "The assassination plot...was directed by Sam Giancana and John Rosselli, two alleged crime syndicate figures, recruited by the CIA as middlemen for the job. Sam Giancana was installed in a suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami."
  
• 6/19/1975 Ford authorized establishment of the President Ford Committee to promote his election in 1976.
  
• 6/19/1975 Ford sent Congress a special message outlining a program to combat crime.
  
• 6/20/1975 Chicago Tribune reported that William Colby confirmed that "foreigners" had sought CIA help on a plot to kill De Gaulle in the '60s, but he said the agency refused to participate.
  
• 6/23/1975 Washington appeals court rules that a warrant is required for wiretaps by the executive branch.
  
• 6/24/1975 John Roselli testifies before the Church Committee and discusses his role as a CIA-Mafia liaison in the Castro assassination plots.
  
• 6/25/1975 Angola (or Mozambique) becomes independent from Portugal.
  
• 6/26/1975 Supreme Court ruled unanimously that mental patients are free to leave psychiatric institutions provided they are not dangerous. Justice Stewart asked, "May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different?"
  
• 6/26/1975 India: Indira Gandhi's election to parliament was invalidated by the high court of Allahabad on the grounds of election fraud; she is barred from any public office for six years. She had illegally retained the services of a government official as a campaign organizer in her 1971 election. Or the court invalidated it 6/12.
  
• 6/28/1975 Gordon Shanklin takes emergency early retirement from the FBI. James Hosty believes this was prompted by a story the Dallas Time Herald was planning on the Oswald note that was destroyed. Shanklin told director Kelley he knew nothing about the note, and Kelley told this to the Herald. (Assignment Oswald 188)
  
• 6/28/1975 TV and film writer Rod Serling died of a heart attack following surgery at the age of 50.
  
• 6/30/1975 Ford signed a bill extending the unemployment compensation program through 1975 for a maximum of 65 weeks of aid.
  
• 6/30/1975 Supreme Court rules that defendants have the right to conduct their own defense rather than accept court-appointed counsel.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1975 Kissinger got Ford's approval for a covert military program designed to install a pro-US regime in Angola.
  
• 7/1975 issue of the men's magazine Genesis contained "How the CIA Controls President Ford" By L. Fletcher Prouty
  
• 7/1/1975 Treasury Dept sells 499,500 ounces of gold at auction at $165 an ounce.
  
• 7/1/1975 National Security Council, Disarray in Chile Policy, July 1, 1975: This memorandum, from Stephen Low to President Ford's National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, conveys concern about wavering U.S. policy toward Chile in light of reports of human rights violations. The memo reveals a division within the U.S. embassy over dealing with Chile, with a number of officials now believing that all U.S. military and economic assistance should be terminated until the regime's human rights record improves. According to Low, by reducing aid and sending "mixed signals" to the Chileans, the United States risks precipitating a crisis situation in Chile. Low concludes his memo by recommending that Scowcroft schedule a special meeting in which U.S. agencies can "clarify guidelines for future policy."
  
• 7/1/1975 Laid-off NYC policemen demonstrate to protest the city's financial crisis.
  
• 7/1-3/1975 NYC sanitation workers go on strike because of the financial crisis.
  
• 7/1/1975 Henry Wade told Robert Sam Anson that he felt that Oswald was part of a larger conspiracy. He also told Anson that he thought JFK's autopsy was "the worst" he had seen in his career. (They've Killed the President p95)
  
• 7/8/1975 Ford announces he will run in the 1976 election. Ford found himself facing opposition from the conservative wing of his party, which he had always been identified with.
  
• 7/8/1975 In an interview with Tom Wicker, Allen Dulles told him that he had pushed JFK into going along with the Bay of Pigs by repeatedly suggesting that he would look weak on communism if he didn't.
  
• 7/8/1975 Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin arrives in West Germany, the first such visit by an Israeli head of state.
  
• 7/9/1975 Ford's campaign chairman, Howard Calloway, implies that Rockefeller won't be Ford's running-mate.
  
• 7/11/1975 John Sirica reduces the sentences of the four Cubans involved in the Watergate break-in.
  
• 7/11/1975 Chinese announce the discovery of the 2000-year-old burial mound of Emperor Shih Hwang-ti; it contains over 6000 life-size clay soldiers.
  
• 7/12/1975 US Army Col. Ernest R. Morgan is released in Beirut after being held hostage 13 days by a left-wing faction of the Palestine Liberation Army.
  
• 7/13/1975 Israeli planes raid large Palestinian refugee camp; Arabs retaliate with rockets.
  
• 7/15/1975 US and USSR begin the Apollo/Soyuz mission; both spacecraft take off the same day (with the Soviets broadcasting their launch live on TV for the first time), headed for rendezvous.
  
• 7/15/1975 Ford sends a message to the Soviet Cosmonauts and the American Astronauts, hailing their joint space mission as "blazing a new trail of international space cooperation."
  
• 7/16/1975 Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty testifies before the Church Committee. In his testimony, Prouty states that Richard Helms had definite knowledge of and participated in the assassination program against Fidel Castro.
  
• 7/16/1975 It is announced that the USSR will make a major purchase of wheat from the US.
  
• 7/17/1975 US Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft link up in space; they remain in orbit together for two days.
  
• 7/17/1975 Hosty was questioned by FBI agent Harry Bassett about the Oswald note; Bassett didn't want to hear that Shanklin had ordered its destruction. He wanted to blame Kyle Clark. (Assignment Oswald 186)
  
• 7/19/1975 Frank Church, in a press conference today, says that the CIA has acted like a "rogue elephant." Committee member, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, says that there is friction on the Church Committee between "those who want to protect the Kennedys and those who want to tell the truth." Years from now, Goldwater will also say: "We spent nine of the ten months trying to get Kennedy's name out of it."
  
• 7/21/1975 Cowan, Edward - "New Study Urged in Kennedy Death" - New York Times
  
• 7/22/1975 "Congressional investigators have received information that on the day President Kennedy was killed, the [CIA] was making arrangements in Paris for a plot to assassinate [Castro], according to informed sources. The coincidence in timing becomes all the more bizarre in light of Castro's own account of what he was doing when Kennedy was killed. According to the Cuban premier, he was in Varadero, Cuba, that afternoon listening to an intermediary - a French journalist named Jean Daniel - talk about Kennedy's apparent interest in re-establishing contact between the two nations. Daniel had just spoken with Kennedy in Washington, Castro related in the recently published book, With Fidel. [Author not given.] 'In my opinion,' Castro said, 'this was a definite gesture on Kennedy's party [sic] to try to establish contact, an exchange with us.' Washington Post, George Lardner, Jr. 7/22/75
  
• 7/24/1975 Just as he had done with the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, DCI Colby promised his full cooperation to the Pike Committee. Colby, accompanied by Special Counsel Mitchell Rogovin and Enno H. Knoche, Assistant to the Director, met with Pike and Congressman McClory, the ranking Republican on the committee, on 24 July 1975. At the meeting, Colby expressed his continuing belief that the committee would find that the main thrust of US intelligence was "good, solid, and trustworthy." Pike responded that he had no intention of destroying US intelligence. What he wanted, he told Colby, was to build public and Congressional understanding and support for intelligence by "exposing" as much as possible of its nature without doing harm to proper intelligence activities. Pike related to Colby that he knew the investigation would cause "occasional conflict between us, but that a constructive approach by both sides should resolve it." Privately, Pike indicated that he believed the Agency was a "rogue elephant" out of control, as Senator Church had charged publicly. It needed to be restrained and major reporting reforms initiated. Colby, unaware of Pike's private views, then sought an agreement with Pike and McClory on procedural matters much like the Agency had negotiated with the Church Committee. Colby outlined his responsibility for protecting sources and methods and the complexity posed in meeting "far-flung requests for all documents and files" relating to a given topic. Pike would have none of Colby's reasoning. He assured the DCI that the committee had its own security standards. He also refused to allow the CIA or the executive branch to stipulate the terms under which the committee would receive or review classified information. Pike insisted, moreover, that the committee had the authority to declassify intelligence documents unilaterally. He appeared bent on asserting what he saw as the Constitutional prerogatives of the legislative branch over the executive branch, and the CIA was caught in the middle. Given Pike's position, the committee's relationship with the Agency and the White House quickly deteriorated. It soon became open warfare. Confrontation would be the key to CIA and White House relationships with the Pike Committee and its staff. Early on, Republican Representative James Johnson set the tone for the relationship when he told Seymour Bolten, chief of the CIA Review Staff, "You, the CIA, are the enemy." Colby came to consider Pike a "jackass" and his staff "a ragtag, immature and publicity-seeking group." Even Colby's rather reserved counsel, Mitch Rogovin, saw Pike as "a real prickly guy...to deal with." Rogovin believed Pike was not really wrong in his position. "He just made it so goddamn difficult. You also had to deal with Pike's political ambitions." The CIA Review Staff, which worked closely with both the Church Committee and Pike Committee staffs, never developed the same cooperative relationship with the Pike Committee staffers that it did with the Church Committee. The Review Staff pictured the Pike staffers as "flower children, very young and irresponsible and naive." According to CIA officer Richard Lehman, the Pike Committee staffers were "absolutely convinced that they were dealing with the devil incarnate." For Lehman, the Pike staff "came in loaded for bear." Donald Gregg, the CIA officer responsible for coordinating Agency responses to the Pike Committee, remembered, "The months I spent with the Pike Committee made my tour in Vietnam seem like a picnic. I would vastly prefer to fight the Viet Cong than deal with a polemical investigation by a Congressional committee, which is what the Pike Committee [investigation] was." An underlying problem was the large cultural gap between officers trained in the early years of the Cold War and the young staffers of the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As for the White House, it viewed Pike as "unscrupulous and roguish." Henry Kissinger, while appearing to cooperate with the committee, worked hard to undermine its investigations and to stonewall the release of documents to it. Relations between the White House and the Pike Committee became worse as the investigations progressed. William Hyland, an assistant to Kissinger, found Pike "impossible." In his first meeting with Colby on 24 July 1975, Pike indicated his committee would begin its investigation by concentrating on intelligence budgets. He told Colby he personally believed that knowledge of intelligence expenditures should be open and widespread.
  
• 7/26/1975 Ford departs on his second trip to Europe - "a mission of peace and progress" - for visits to West Germany, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and to Helsinki to meet leaders of 34 other nations and sign the final act of the European Security Conference.
  
• 7/28/1975 Illustrative of just how quickly the relationship between the Agency and the Pike Committee turned sour was a sarcastic letter Pike addressed to Colby on 28 July 1975, only four days after their first meeting. In the letter, Pike informed the DCI that the committee would be investigating the IC's budget. Pike began the letter by stating, "First of all, it's a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped 'Secret' on every page." Pike then criticized Colby's letters--which laid out the basic legislation establishing the National Security Council, the CIA, and the DCI and detailed the compartmentation issue in developing the atomic bomb and the U-2--as not "particularly pertinent to the present issue." Pike made it clear he was seeking information on the IC's budget. He wrote that he was not interested in history, sources and methods, or the names of agents. "I am seeking to obtain information on how much of the taxpayers' dollars you spend each year and the basic purposes for which it is spent," he wrote Colby. He justified his focus on the budget by citing Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution: "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of public money be published from time to time." He then continued: "I would assume that a reasonable place to look for that statement of account would be in the Budget of the United States Government and while it may be in there, I can't find it. I hope that Mr. Lynn [James Lynn, Director of the Office of Management and Budget] may be able to help me. The Index of the Budget for fiscal year 1976 under the "C's" moves from Center for Disease Control to Chamizal Settlement and to a little old country lawyer, it would seem to me that between those two might have been an appropriate place to find the CIA but it is not there. It's possibly in there somewhere but I submit that it is not there in the manner which the founding fathers intended and the Constitution requires." Pike seemed to believe that, "by following the dollars," the committee could "locate activities and priorities of our intelligence services."
  
• 7/28/1975 Congress approves a bill extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for seven years, including provisions safeguarding voting rights of non-English speaking groups.
  
• 7/28/1975 A Teamsters strike that stopped publication of Pittsburgh's two newspapers for a month ends.
  
• 7/29/1975 Jackie Onassis celebrates her 46th birthday. During a visit earlier this month to Hyannisport, she sadly tells Rose Kennedy that she can no longer remember JFK's voice and can't bear to look at pictures of him. "I have always lived through men," she tells a friend. "Now I realize I can't do that anymore."
  
• 7/29/1975 Congress overrides Ford's veto of a $2 billion health bill.
  
• 7/29-8/2/1975 Summit in Helsinki, Finland; agreement on self-determination for all nations.
  
• 7/30/1975 Jimmy Hoffa was lured from his Detroit home to a supposed union meeting at the Manchus Red Fox restaurant. The last he was heard from was when he called his wife at 2pm to tell her that the men he was waiting for had not arrived yet. He was seen driving away from the restaurant with several men about 2:45 and was never seen again. The man reportedly responsible for Hoffa's disappearance was Provenzano man Salvatore Briguglio. Various accounts of his death have circulated. Jimmy Hoffa is scheduled to meet Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official and reputed member of the crime syndicate. Hoffa is never seen again.
  
• 7/30/1975 Castro charges the CIA with at least 24 assassination attempts on himself and other Cuban leaders, from the early 60s to 1971.
  
• 7/31/1975 The Pike Committee held its first hearing on the CIA budget. Elmer B. Staats, the Comptroller General of the General Accounting Office (GAO), was the first witness. Staats testified that the GAO had no idea how much money the CIA spent or whether its management of that money was effective or wasteful because his agency had no access to CIA budgetary information.
  
• 7/31/1975 Washington Post reported Castro's charges against the CIA. Sen. McGovern got this report after visiting Castro, and he delivered it to the Church Committee. The CIA would later deny any involvement in most of the cases. (Church report p71)
  
• 8/1975 Kissinger signaled Indonesia that the US would not object if that country invaded East Timor.
  
• 8/1795 Branch, Taylor and George Crile III - "The Kennedy Vendetta" - 8/1975 Harpers
  
• 8/1975 Larry Flynt published in Hustler magazine photos taken by an Italian paparazzo of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude on the Greek island of Skorpios.
  
• 8/1/1975 In Helsinki, the US and 34 other countries signed a pact agreeing to recognize the integrity of European boundaries as they were at the end of WWII.
  
• 8/3/1975 John Martino dies at the age of sixty-four. Martino admitted being part of the JFK assassination - supplying equipment and delivering money. He was once arrested in Cuba. He was also very close to William Pawley.
  
• 8/4/1975 When Colby appeared before the committee on 4 August, he refused to testify publicly on the intelligence budget. The next day, however, he appeared in executive session and outlined the expenditures of the Agency in some detail, stressing that the largest portion of the budget was justifiably devoted to the Soviet Union and to China, the primary US intelligence targets. Colby argued that revealing even the total of the CIA budget would do substantial harm to the US intelligence effort. According to Colby, it would enable foreign intelligence services to improve considerably their estimates of US capabilities. Turning the argument around, Colby reasoned that the US Government would benefit considerably from access to this same information concerning the Soviet intelligence effort. He then stated, "To the best of my knowledge, no other intelligence service in the world publicizes its intelligence budget." Colby further argued that public knowledge of CIA budget totals would not significantly increase the public's or Congress's ability to make judgments about CIA programs because, without greater detail and understanding of the programs themselves, no significant conclusions could be drawn. Rogovin and other CIA officials evidently believed Colby had presented a strong case before the committee for maintaining secrecy in the budgetary process. They thought he had effectively deflected all major criticisms. On 4 August 1975, Pike aired his frustration in a committee hearing. "What we have found thus far is a great deal of the language of cooperation and a great deal of the activity of noncooperation," he announced. Other committee members felt that trying to get information from the CIA or the White House was like "pulling teeth."
  
• 8/8/1975 National Security Council, Chilean President's visit to U.S., August 8, 1975: This memorandum, written by Stephen Low of the National Security Council, calls Scowcroft's attention to Pinochet's plans to visit the United States, and his requested meeting with U.S. President Ford. The memo states that the NSC asked the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, David Popper, to discourage the meeting by telling the Chileans that President Ford's schedule is full. Fearing that such a visit would "stimulate criticism" and foster embarrassment, Low suggests an "informal talk" with Chile's Ambassador Trucco.
  
• 8/14/1975 New York Times reported that there were "many signs pointing to the possibility that the Earth may be heading for another ice age…"
  
• 8/15/1975 Sheik Mujibur Rahman, president of Bangladesh, was assassinated during a coup.
  
• 8/18/1975 Six member unions in the AFL-CIO announce a boycott on loading of grain bound for the USSR.
  
• 8/18/1975 An anonymous letter dated this day and written in Spanish, with a Mexico City postmark, is sent to Texas researcher Penn Jones. It contains the "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter purportedly from Oswald. The typewritten cover letter said (in Spanish) that a copy of the Hunt letter had been sent to FBI director Kelley late in 1974: "To my understanding it could have brought out the circumstances of the assassination of President Kennedy. Since Mr. Kelley hasn't responded to that letter, I've got the right to believe something bad might happen to me, and that is why I see myself obligated to keep myself away for a short time..." The FBI denied ever receiving it. Jones failed to locate the author in Mexico City, and then sent a copy of the letter to Earl Golz, who sent it to Paul Rothermel, who in turn passed it to the FBI. The Dallas Morning News got three handwriting experts to examine the Hunt letter; all three concluded that the signature was Oswald's. The HSCA in 1978 was unable to come to a conclusion on this.
  
• 8/18/1975 Brezhnev meets with 18 US Congressmen at Yalta.
  
• 8/21/1975 Kissinger arrives in Israel for more talks on Middle East peace.
  
• 8/27-28/1975 a federal court jury in Cleveland exonerates 27 Ohio national guardsmen in connection with the Kent State shooting. Or this was done by Gov. James Rhodes. 8/27/1975 Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie died. With his death came various forms of rationalization from many Rastafarians. The responses concerning Selassie's death ranged from "his death was a fabrication" to "his death was inconsequential because Haile Selassie was merely a personification' of God."
  
• 8/30/1975 Bob Dudney and Hugh Aynesworth called Hosty about an article they planned to publish on Oswald's note. Shanklin was denying he ever knew anything about the note; Hosty refused to comment. (Assignment Oswald 182)
  
• 8/31/1975 Dallas Times Herald reported that Oswald had left a note to James Hosty at the Dallas FBI office two weeks before the assassination. "FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley confirmed today (Saturday) that inquiries conducted in response to questions asked by The Dallas Times Herald tend to substantiate that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Dallas FBI office several days prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, apparently as a result of an interview by an FBI agent of his wife Marina in connection with the FBI investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination which was documented in the Warren Commission report. Oswald left a note addressed to this agent and although recollections vary as to the wording of the note, it was for the purpose of warning the agent to desist from further interviews of his wife. FBI inquiries to date establish that the note contained no references to President Kennedy or in any way have forewarned of the subsequent assassination. Prior to the current FBI inquiries, there had been no information concerning this visit and note recorded in FBI records, and inquiries tend to corroborate that shortly after the assassination, the note in question was destroyed. Inquiries are continuing to determine the full facts concerning the handling of this matter. The Attorney General has from the inception been kept informed of the progress of the FBI inquiries to date. Director Kelley has indicated that there will be no further comment for publication until all inquiries have been concluded and the matter considered by the department." "The FBI probe into Oswald's visit was launched as a result of questions asked by The Times Herald during a July 6, 1975, meeting with Kelley in Washington FBI headquarters. The Times Herald had been checking the previously unreported incident for more than two months." Shanklin denied to the Herald that he knew anything about the note. Shanklin said he had "heard reports" that Oswald had been in a garage adjacent to the downtown FBI offices prior to the assassination, but that he had been unable to verify that report. "I never could check that report out," he said. At the time, FBI offices were in the Santa Fe Building in downtown Dallas, less than 10 blocks from the TSBD. Hosty today says there was no threat of violence, but he testified that Dallas Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy it after the assassination. After Oswald was shot, Shanklin told Hosty, "Oswald's dead now. There can be no trial. Here - get rid of this." Hosty tore up the note and flushed it down the toilet. Oswald had told Ruth Paine that he had left a note at the Dallas FBI office, but when she told this to the FBI they denied it. The story claimed that Hosty had destroyed the note on his own, without his supervisors' knowledge. But Kelley refused to fire Hosty over the story. (Assignment Oswald 189)
  

[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."
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1975 In the Chicago Independent, Edwin Black writes about a plot in Chicago in early November 1963 to kill JFK. Edwin Black - a reporter for The Chicago Independent, traces Thomas Arthur Vallee to a trailer park outside Houston, Texas. (Vallee was arrested on Nov. 2, 1963 based on an a tip that he was going to try to assassinate JFK during the President's visit to Chicago, Illinois.) When asked what happened on Nov. 2nd, Vallee replied: "Soldier Field, the plot against John F. Kennedy, I was arrested." He denied threatening JFK, saying he had been framed.
  
• 11/1975 a Senate subcommittee, which was charged with investigating the CIA's assassination plots, uncovered the details of Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell Exner. Although it comprised just a small footnote, which was buried deep into the report, it was nevertheless exposed by Republicans.
  
• 11/1975 CBS interview with Dan Rather, LBJ aide Joseph Califano said that Johnson "used to say that - that he thought in time, when all the activities of the CIA were flushed out and when - then - then maybe the whole story of the Kennedy assassination would be known." Califano, former director of RFK's Cuban Coordinating Committee, will recall that "on more than one occasion" LBJ expressed "a very strong opinion, almost a conviction," that Kennedy's death was a "response and retaliation" by Fidel Castro.
  
• 11/1975 Ford sent a letter to Sen. Church asking him not to make his panel's assassination report public because it would "do grevious damage to our country" and be "exploited by foreign nations and groups hostile to the United States." Church replied that it had always been the panel's intention to make the report public and felt the country would be "better served by letting the American people know the true and complete story" behind the plots. (Profiles of an Era 126)
  
• 11/2/1975 Ford fires William Colby as CIA director. Schlesinger resigns, Kissinger gives up NSC post. Ford appoints George Herbert Walker Bush to the post.
  
• 11/2/1975 Australian PM Edward Gough Whitlam charged that the CIA was funding the right-wing opposition Country Party.
  
• 11/3/1975 Rockefeller withdrew his name from consideration as Ford's running-mate in 1976. Partly this was because of criticism of him by Rep. Bo Callaway (R-Georgia), who was in charge of Ford's campaign.
  
• 11/4/1975 Ford instituted a shakeup among his National Security officers; Colby and Schlesinger were replaced with George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Scowcroft became Assistant for National Security Affairs. Dick Cheney becomes White House chief of staff. Reagan would later jab at Ford that he had "fired the wrong Secretary," meaning he should have fired Kissinger. Polls in mid November showed that GOP voters preferred Reagan over Ford 40-32%. President Ford fires a number of Nixon holdovers and replaces them with "my guys… my own team," both to show his independence and to prepare for a bruising 1976 primary battle with Ronald Reagan. The wholesale firings and reshufflings are dubbed the "Halloween Massacre." Donald Rumsfeld becomes secretary of defense, replacing James Schlesinger. George H. W. Bush replaces William Colby as director of the CIA. Henry Kissinger remains secretary of state, but his position as national security adviser is given to Brent Scowcroft. Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld's deputy chief of staff, moves up to become the youngest chief of staff in White House history. Perhaps the most controversial decision is to replace Nelson Rockefeller as Ford's vice-presidential candidate for the 1976 elections. Ford's shake-up is widely viewed as his cave-in to Republican Party hardliners. He flounders in his defense of his new staffers: for example, when Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) asks him why he thinks Rumsfeld is qualified to run the Pentagon, Ford replies, "He was a pilot in the Korean War." The ultimate winner in the shake-up is Rumsfeld, who instigated the moves from behind the scenes and gains the most from them. Rumsfeld quickly wins a reputation in Washington as a political opportunist, gunning for the vice presidency in 1976 and willing to do whatever is necessary to get it. Rockefeller tells Ford: "Rumsfeld wants to be president of the United States. He has given George Bush the deep six by putting him in the CIA, he has gotten me out.… He was third on your [vice-presidential] list (see August 16-17, 1974) and now he has gotten rid of two of us.… You are not going to be able to put him on the [ticket] because he is defense secretary, but he is not going to want anybody who can possibly be elected with you on that ticket.… I have to say I have a serious question about his loyalty to you." Later, Ford will write of his sharp regret in pushing Rockefeller off the ticket: "I was angry at myself for showing cowardice in not saying to the ultraconservatives: It's going to be Ford and Rockefeller, whatever the consequences." [Werth, 2006, pp. 340-341] "It was the biggest political mistake of my life," Ford later says. "And it was one of the few cowardly things I did in my life." [US Senate, 7/7/2007]
  
• 11/4/1975 US embassy in Australia told the government there that the CIA was not in any way involved in aiding any political parties.
  
• 11/6/1975 William Colby testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence that in 1964 a CIA official attached to the NSC prepared campaign material for LBJ and, with the help of another CIA employee, got advance texts of Goldwater's speeches; the official was identified as Chester Cooper, who was then an asst deputy director of intelligence. The other employee was a female secretary; no mention was made of Hunt. (It Didn't Start With Watergate 172)
  
• 11/6/1975 Whitlam repeated the charge that the CIA was interfering in Australian politics.
  
• 11/7/1975 Colby denied any CIA interference in Australian politics.
  
• 11/7/1975 Remote electronic sensors at Malmstrom AFB (home of more than 20 Minuteman missiles), indicated that something had violated site security. Two officers who were monitoring the signals called site security who in turn dispatched a helicopter and a Sabotage Alert Team (SAT) to investigate. As the SAT team approached the area in question they could see an orange, glowing object. As they slowly closed in they could see that the object was tremendous in size. They radioed to the Launch Control Facility and informed them that they were witnessing a brightly glowing, orange, football field-size disc. The SAT were ordered to proceed but they refused to do so. The object started to rise slowly and when it reached about 1000ft it was picked up on radar by NORAD. As a result 2 F-106 jet interceptors were launched. As the jets approached the object shot away vertically and was lost from radar at about 200,000 feet. The operators at the Launch Control facility noticed that the missiles were indicating that they had been tampered with. After a series of checks it was established that all the missiles had had their target co-ordinates changed! As a result of this investigation, another incident at Malmstrom was uncovered. During the week of March 20th 1967 a flight of 10 missiles developed problems as their flight path came within a short distance of a UFO which was being tracked on radar. FOIA requests for more information have been refused.
  
• 11/8/1975 CIA reported to Ford, "The determination of the Australian opposition to force a general election is weakening. Prime Minister Whitlam has managed to raise real alarm about the dire consequences of government bankruptcy, which he claims will result from the opposition's blocking of government appropriations."
  
• 11/8/1975 CIA's Ted Shackley reported to Australia's intelligence agency, ASIO, that the CIA was gravely concerned about the actions of Whitlam. (Crimes of Patriots)
  
• 11/10/1975 UN General Assembly, in one of its most controversial actions, adopts resolution calling Zionism a form of racism.
  
• 11/11/1975 Australia: PM Edward Whitlam is removed from office by Governor-General John Kerr. The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, commonly called The Dismissal, refers to the events that culminated with the removal of Australia's then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, by Governor-General Sir John Kerr and appointing the Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister. The PM had charged that the CIA was funding his right-wing political opposition. Nov 8 CIA reported to Ford, "The determination of the Australian opposition to force a general election is weakening. Prime Minister Whitlam has managed to raise real alarm about the dire consequences of government bankruptcy, which he claims will result from the opposition's blocking of government appropriations." CIA's Ted Shackley reported to Australia's intelligence agency, ASIO, that the CIA was gravely concerned about the actions of Whitlam. (Crimes of Patriots)
  
• 11/11/1975 Senate JFK Subcommittee Chairman Schweiker decides Church Committee staff is focusing investigation in possible Castro involvement in assassination, decides involvement of CIA with anti-Castro groups also needs probing, and puts Gaeton Fonzi on staff to pursue leads in Miami's Little Havana. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 11/12/1975 Gov. George Wallace joins the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 11/12/1975 William O. Douglas retires from the Supreme Court after 36 years.
  
• 11/12/1975 Memo from Robert Teeter and Stu Spencer to Richard Cheney concerning the upcoming Ford campaign: "We have for the past year and undoubtedly will be for the next year, dealing with an electorate that is more alienated and more cynical than at any point in modern time. These feelings of alienation and cynicism are directed at all major institutions...The common evil most people see in our institutions is their size. Bigness is again and again mentioned as what is wrong. As the society has gotten larger and more complex, individuals have lost their ability to influence any of the institutions that affect their lives...We badly need to find some positions and issues where the President can violate his stereotype as a classic Republican. The problem is every position or statement he has made recently has been something that would have been expected from a Republican President...The President needs to set forth in a major speech sometime soon his idea for what the destiny of the country is and how his programs relates to it. I think the backbone of this theme ought to be anti-bigness. He ought to be against big government, big unions, big businesses, big school systems and the concentration of power in general...Detente is a particularly unpopular idea with most Republican primary voters and the word is worse. We ought to stop using the word whenever possible...the endorsement of respected conservative Repulican officeholders and politicians is particularly important at this time as to destroy Reagan's credibility as a loyal Republican."
  
• 11/14/1975 Ford signed legislation raising the ceiling on the national debt to $595 billion.
  
• 11/14/1975 Kissinger announces that US is prepared to hold talks with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia about normalizing relations.
  
• 11/14/1975 Cuban troops save the MPLA government in Angola by defeating an invading South African army.
  
• 11/15/1975 Ford to Paris for economic summit.
  
• 11/16/1975 Washington Post leaked the identity of Judith Campbell Exner four days before the Senate Committee on Intelligence released its report.
  
• 11/17/1975 US News & World Report published the results of a poll of members of the Democratic National Committee. They were asked who they thought would be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1976. Humphrey was number one with 49%, Henry Jackson number two at 14%, and Jimmy Carter a distant last at 3%.
  
• 11/19/1975 Jack Anderson disclosed details of the CIA's spying operation against him; he identified the CIA operation under the agency's code name, Project Mudhen. He said Project Mudhen was terminated after he sent "my Katzenjammer paparazzi" (his nine children armed with cameras) to take pictures of CIA agents who watched him.
  
• 11/20/1975 Church Committee reports that American officials plotted to kill, through the CIA, two foreign leaders and were involved in plots to kill three others. They also used organized crime figures in some of these plots. This is the first time a congressional investigation has ever determined that assassination was employed as an instrument of US foreign policy. The CIA had plotted the assassinations of at least five foreign leaders, including "concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro from 1960-1965" which used "assassination devices [that] ran the gamut from high-powered rifles to poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination." In his memoirs, Lyndon Johnson had written: "We were aware of stories that Castro...only lately accusing us of sending CIA agents into the country to assassinate him, was the perpetrator of the Oswald assassination plot. These rumors were another compelling reason that a thorough study had to be made of the Dallas tragedy at once." (The Vantage Point p26)
  
• 11/20/1975 Ronald Reagan announces his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination
  
• 11/20/1975 Ford announces he is waiting for NYC and New York state to take "concrete action" before giving aid.
  
• 11/21/1975 Richard Case Nagell wrote back to Rep. Edwards, sending him an affidavit that he had sent a letter to Hoover that warned of a plot involving Oswald to kill JFK, probably in Washington DC, somewhere between 9/26 and 9/29/1963. Nagell signed the letter to Hoover using an alias, Joseph Kramer. He told Edwards he was willing to take a polygraph. Edwards would later tell Dick Russell he never received the affidavit, which was mailed separately. (Man Who Knew Too Much 57)
  
• 11/23/1975 Washington Star quoted former WC staffer David Belin calling for reopening the Kennedy case because the WC had not known about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. On Face the Nation (CBS), Belin said, "No member of the legal staff of the Warren Commission knew about CIA plots directed against foreign leaders, including Castro. I don't know of any member of the Commission, other than Dulles, that knew that the CIA had been involved, and I have specifically discussed this with some of the living members." During this interview Belin remarked that because no conspiracy had been uncovered since the assassination, this was "in itself evidence of the fact there was no conspiracy." CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr replied, "Or that it was a very good one."
  
• 11/24/1975 Time anniversary issue on the JFK assassination ("Who Killed JFK? Just One Assassin") once again tried to lay all doubts to rest. They published the Life cover photo of Oswald again, but this time cropped off at the figure's knees so that no shadows on the ground could be seen. They also "rotated the whole photo a few degrees to the right, aligning the figure vertically, then recropping to straighten the sides and lightly airbrushing the background of fence and houses to obscure the fact that now the background was tilting crazily to the right....To top it off, with the same article, Time printed a diagram of Dealey Plaza which totally mislocated the famous grassy knoll...in the Time drawing, the grassy knoll is shown at Zapruder's left, just next to the depository...The newcomer will look at Time's diagram and justly conclude that, since the grassy knoll and the depository are next to each other, the conflict among the witnesses about the origin of the shots must not be so important." (Oglesby, Yankee and Cowboy War) Ed Magnuson wrote in that issue that NY urologist Dr. John "Lattimer and his sons have fired the Oswald-type gun and ammunition into the rear of human skulls packed with gelatin....in each case the skulls toppled backward off their stands, never forward. Similar tests were conducted with melons by Physicist Luis Alvarez...with the same results."
  
• 11/24/1975 William Alexander, former Assistant Dallas County DA says today: "I was convinced all along that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Now I don't even know who's buried in Oswald's grave. I think there should be an exhumation of the body."
  
• 11/24/1975 Civil war started in Angola.
  
• 11/25/1975 leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met, with Juan Manuel Contreras in Santiago de Chile. The main objective was for the CIA to coordinate the actions of the various security services in "eliminating Marxist subversion". Operation Condor was given tacit approval by the United States which feared a Marxist revolution in the region. The targets were officially leftist guerrillas but in fact included all kinds of political opponents
  
• 11/25-26/1975 CBS airs 'The American Assassins: Lee Harvey Oswald and John F. Kennedy', hosted by Dan Rather. They relied on the Itek study commissioned by CBS, and showed the Zapruder film. They staged another shooting recreation, using a moving target and a reproduction of Dealey Plaza. 11 expert riflemen tried to duplicate the shooting feat that Oswald supposedly did. After practicing, two men were able to get two out of three hits in 5.6 seconds. Carl Oglesby noted, "CBS does not pause to say how many total series were fired by these eleven, or how many times the two who did it once could do it again....Since it was possible, it was possible for Oswald. Therefore he must have done it." Dan Rather announced that Oswald had scored, "after all, in the second highest category of marksmen in an outfit, the United States Marines, that prides itself on its marksmanship." CBS concluded that while not all questions had been answered, the basic findings of the WC were correct. Rather stated, "We think the available evidence shows the single bullet theory is at least possible - that's the most that can be said." Rather explained that Itek found that after the head shot, "the President's head went forward with extreme speed, almost twice as rapidly as it subsequently traveled backwards...[Jackie] may have pushed her husband backward while pushing herself forward away from him as a reflex reaction to the fatal shot hit."
  
• 11/26/1975 A CBS Reports special called "The American Assassins (Part II)" is broadcast on this date. In it, LBJ says: "[Oswald] was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have a connection that bore examination, and the extent of the influence of those connections on him I think history will deal with more than we're able to now."
  
• 11/26/1975 New York Legislature votes tax increase. Banks and teachers union agree to joint plan to avert New York City default. Ford agrees to help NYC get out of its financial mess.
  
• 11/26/1975 Lynette Fromme is convicted by a federal jury in Sacramento of attempting to assassinate Ford.
  
• 11/27/1975 Ford asks $2.3 billion U.S. loans for New York City to help finance plan to avert default.
  
• 11/28/1975 A bomb explodes in the car of the Cuban ambassador to Mexico.
  
• 11/29/1975 Ford signed legislation requiring states to provide free education for handicapped between ages 3 and 21.
  
• 11/29/1975 Ford departs for visits to People's Republic of China, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
  
• 12/1975 US unemployment rate was at 8.3%; inflation for the past twelve months was 9.1%.1975 statistics: US Federal spending was $332 billion ($53.2 billion deficit). National debt was $533 billion. Inflation rate was 9.1%. Poverty rate was 12.3%.
  
• 12/1975 Cartha DeLoach told the Church Committee that LBJ had become "somewhat obsessed with the fact that he himself might be assassinated... it was very apparent to personnel of the FBI that the President was obsessed with fear concerning possible assassination." Johnson actually ordered FBI agents to supplement his Secret Service protection. (Intelligence Committee report 175-6)
  
• 12/1-5/1975 Ford visits China and talks with Mao Tse-Tung and Deng Hsiao-ping.
  
• 12/2/1975 Communist Pathet Lao now controls most of Laos; they abolished the monarchy and established the Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos.
  
• 12/2/1975 Israeli air raid against Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
  
• 12/4/1975 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the CIA; it found that the Agency had worked to stop Allende from taking office and then to destabilize his presidency. Though it could not tie the CIA directly to the coup in Chile, it said the Agency had "created the atmosphere" for a coup.
  
• 12/5 or 6/1975 Kissinger and Ford, winding up their tour of Asia, leave Indonesia. Ford had met with Mao Tse-tung; Chinese leaders expressed their concern about US detente with the Soviets.
  
• 12/7/1975 Ford announces in Honolulu a Pacific Doctrine of "peace with all and hostility toward none."
  
• 12/7/1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor; over the next year, tens of thousands of Timorese were killed. The invaders used US military equipment, which was against US law (military aid was supposed to be for defensive purposes only). Congress briefly cut off military aid to Indonesia, but Kissinger made sure it was only for 6 months.
  
• 12/8/1975 A veto by the US blocks a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its air raid against Palestinian refugee camps.
  
• 12/9/1975 Ford signed legislation authorizing the Treasury to lend NYC $2.3 billion a year until 6/30/1978.
  
• 12/10/1975 United Press reports: "Representative Thomas Downing, calling for a congressional investigation, said Monday he believes a foreign conspiracy supported by a domestic cover-up' led to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy..." Suspicion is now being focused on Cuba.
  
• 12/10/1975 L.A. Police and District Attorney's Office conduct a search of the RFK assassination crime scene, looking for bullets fired by a second gunman; none are found.
  
• 12/12/1975 Sara Jane Moore pleaded guilty to trying to kill President Ford.
  
• 12/12/1975 James Hosty testified before the House; it was presided over by Rep. Don Edwards, a former FBI agent who left the Bureau because of Hoover. Edwards seemed to be sympathetic to Hosty's plight. (Assignment Oswald 203) Hosty then testified before the Senate's Church Committee on this day: "the records of my testimony have been locked away and will never see the light of day," he recalled. "Gary Hart...ask[ed] some rather silly questions about whether right-wing Cuban exiles had anything to do with the killing of Kennedy...I told him I knew nothing to support to such a far-fetched theory." The Committee revealed to Hosty that it was the FBI that failed to tell him that Kostikov was linked to the KGB's assassination squad in October 1963. Hosty testified four days in all. (Ibid. 206)
  
• 12/17/1975 Ford opposes U.S. combat role in Angola War. But he strongly objected to Congress' cutoff of funds for covert CIA operations in the war.
  
• 12/17/1975 Judith Campbell Exner held a press conference in San Diego in which she denied having a role in the plots against Castro.
  
• 12/17/1975 Lynette Fromme is sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to kill Ford.
  
• 12/18/1975 General Earle Gilmore Wheeler (67 yrs. old) dies of natural causes while being taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital in an ambulance. Wheeler, JFK's staff director at the Joint Chiefs of staff, later became head of the Joint Chief's after JFK's death. It was Wheeler who ran LBJ's -- and later Richard Nixon's -- operations in the Pentagon regarding the war in Vietnam.
  
• 12/18/1975 Meeting between Kissinger, Ingersoll, Eagleburger and Philip Habib. Kissinger was angry that his aides had cabled him about the use of US arms by the Indonesians; it would leak "and it will go to Congress too and then we will have hearings on it....You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary situation. Everything on paper will be used against me....The Department is falling apart and has reached the point where it disobeys clear-cut orders...We cut it off [aid to Indonesia] while we are studying it. We intend to start again in January." (The Nation 10/29/1990)
  
• 12/18/1975 Woodward and Bernstein reported in the Post that Ford pardoned Nixon "after hearing urgent pleas from the former President's top aides that he be spared the threat of criminal prosecution." They quoted "a reliable source" as saying that Ford give Haig "private assurances" 8/28/1974 that Nixon would be granted a pardon. They also cited a memo from Garment written 8/28/1974 urging Ford to grant a pardon because of Nixon's mental and physical condition. Haig told the Post that he did talk with Ford 8/28 about a pardon.
  
• 12/20/1975 The program to resettle Vietnamese refugees in the US ends.
  
• 12/21/1975 Ford succeeds in pushing through his temporary tax cut bill.
  
• 12/22/1975 Ford signed an energy bill providing for an immediate rollback in oil prices and an end to price controls in 40 months.
  
• 12/22/1975 Hersh, Seymour - "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years" - New York Times 12/22/1975
  
• 12/23/1975 Richard S. Welch, chief of the CIA station in Athens, was fatally shot as he arrived home by unknown attackers. The CIA takes the opportunity to rebuild the then-eroding fiction that public scrutiny of the CIA endangers not only national security, but the lives of individual men. The Ford administration responded with a lavish funeral, and a major public relations campaign by Dick Cheney and the CIA put out the message that the Church Committee and criticism of the CIA were responsible for Welch's death.
  
• 12/31/1975 As of this date, US Presidents had issued a total of 11,893 executive orders, which are not even mentioned in the Constitution.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• According to a later French press article, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing says that Gerald Ford told him in 1976 that the Warren Commission was certain about the fact that the JFK assassination was organized but they could not find out which organization was behind the crime. Giscard was in the Ministry of Finance in the De Gaulle government at the time of the assassination.
  
• Sometime this year, four Dallas deputy constables tell the Dallas Morning News that shortly after the JFK assassination they examined a box full of handwritten notes and other papers in the Dallas County Courthouse that linked Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald together. Deputy Billy Preston says he and Constable Robie Lov handed the box of documents over to Dallas D.A. Henry Wade in late 1963 or early 1964. Wade tells the paper he doesn't recall receiving the papers. The box of papers reportedly comes from the apartment of a Dallas woman. Preston cannot recall the woman's name other than "Mary," but then and now he believes she had some connection with Oswald because most of the box's contents appeared to have been written by him. Among the papers in the box, according to the deputies, were newspaper clippings from Mexico, a photocopy of a press card with the words "Daily Worker" issued to Ruby, a receipt from a motel near New Orleans dated several weeks before the assassination with both the names Ruby and Oswald on it and references to calls to Mexico City, papers pinpointing a landing strip somewhere in Mexico, and references to meetings with "agents" in the border towns of McAllen and Laredo. There was also a church brochure with markings indicating something about going to Cuba. Preston says one handwritten note referred to a plan to assassinate JFK during the dedication of a lake or dam in Wisconsin. (Law officials in Wisconsin had speculated in December 1963 about the existence of just such a plan after discovering what appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald's signature on the registry of a restaurant in Hubertus, Wisconsin, dated September 16, 1963. Kennedy indeed had made a speech on September 24, 1963 in Ashland, Wisconsin, as part of a nationwide conservation tour. The FBI rejected the signature as Oswald's and this subject received little attention outside Wisconsin.) Wade finally admits that the incident with the box of documents "might well have happened," but added, "but I know that whatever they had didn't amount to nothing."
  
• Kissinger, the CIA, and SALT: Because the dangers and threats of a nuclear war is the concern of every citizen, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) are of both domestic and international importance. While the conferences, accords, and summit meetings are given substantial coverage in the mass media, the public is little aware of what is really taking place. For example, in 1976, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with the collusion of the Central Intelligence Agency, was accused of manipulating intelligence estimates for use in SALT talk negotiations. According to Aviation Week, the integrity of the US-USSR weapons' pacts was left in doubt when Kissinger directed the CIA to slant range estimates for the Soviet Union's Tupolev Backfire variable geometry bomber. The CIA was ordered to provide McDonnell Douglas, the aerospace firm, with just enough intelligence data to formulate a 3,500 nautical mile range capability. A similar study by the Pentagon, using all available intelligence information, computed the bomber's range at 6,000 nautical miles. This clearly puts the aircraft in the heavy bomber category that would be counted in the 2,400 strategic delivery vehicle limit set in the Ford-Breznhev Vladivostok agreement. Kissinger already had made a separate agreement with the Russians, conceding that the Backfire would not be considered in the heavy bomber category. The directive to the CIA was an attempt to fulfill his commitment. In response to Kissinger's denial and request for a retraction and full apology, Aviation Week's editor and publisher, Robert B. Hotz, responded: "Aviation Week and Space Technology is a responsible publication; verified the facts contained in the original story (AW&ST Sept. 13, p. 13); offers no apology and no retraction.-- (R.B.H.)." The lack of coverage revealing the real negotiations being conducted qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. (Robert B. Hotz, Editor and Publisher, Aviation Week and Space Technology, 9/13/76, p 13. Aviation Week and Space Technology, 9/27/76, P 70.)
  
• Penn Jones Jr. was the first to reference what he termed an "unreported party" under the heading "The Head Man Was In Dallas" on pages 84 to 86 of his self published Forgive My Grief III (Revised). At first Jones' information was so sketchy that he thought the party was held in Sikes, Louisiana. Later Jones enigmatically decided the event was held at the home of Clint Murchison Sr. Jones then managed to circumvent the need to provide factual evidence by claiming on page 86 that, "Admittedly our information about (J. Edgar) Hoover's presence was learned second hand, but it is reliable. We will never tell how we got the information." In the end we were left with another of Jones' Kennedy assassination fabrications. An exaggerated version of the story would surface in later years through allegations made by Madeleine Brown. It would appear Brown used Penn Jones' report in Forgive My Grief III as a basis for some of her pronouncements. However, it would seem she either misread or misunderstood what Jones reported on page 84 of his book. Brown spoke of a lavish party held on the evening of November 21, 1963. She believed Val Imm, the Society Editor of the Dallas Times Herald, attended and reviewed the gala in one of her columns. The reality was Brown was confused and failed to realize that Jones was actually describing a party held almost 6 years later on October 19, 1969 at One Main Place Plaza in Dallas. Brown went so far as to beg Imm to find the story. Imm could never produce the requisite documentation because the event never occurred.
  
• While most Americans believe the increase in oil prices was due to the Arab oil embargo, few are aware that their elected representatives collaborated with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Persian oil producing nations to deliberately inflate the price of oil. The motives behind this costly (to American consumers) collaboration were revealed by author/researcher Vivian H. Oppenheim in a 1976 article in Foreign Policy. As early as 1971, the U.S. State Department established oil policy priorities during international negotiations, emphasizing the "stability, orderliness, and durability" of supply with no intention of maintaining price limits. Only two years later, the Arab oil embargo disrupted both the cost and continuity of foreign oil. While the gasoline prices were skyrocketing and supplies diminishing at the consumer level, the White House Council on International Economic Policy was reporting economic benefits that the increases were generating in the United States. OPEC surplus revenue started recycling back into the American economy; foreign oil-producers began investing in American enterprises -- corporate stocks, real property, and advanced weaponry. Foreign increases in oil prices meant more money for domestic oil-producers as well. Competition with OPEC encouraged domestic production which subsequently spurred increases in domestic oil prices and profits. While the increases contributed to a world-wide recession, U.S. industries, as the government had speculated, suffered less than their competitors in Europe and Japan. The extent of the pay-off due to the collaboration was revealed by Jack Anderson in 1977. According to a secret Central Intelligence Agency survey of the flood of petrodollars into the United States, the oil-producing countries have invested an astounding $34 billion in U.S. holdings over the past three years. Specifically benefiting from this flow is America's bankers. The OPEC nations have entrusted their portfolios to the nation's largest banks, particularly Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty, Bank of America, and New York's First National City Bank. Since, to this day, most Americans are unaware of their own government's prime role in raising oil prices, this story qualifies for consideration as on of the "best censored" stories of 1976. (Foreign Policy, Winter Quarter, 1976, "Why Oil Prices Go Up -- The Past: We Pushed Them," by Vivian H. Oppenheim. "The flood of Arab money into the U.S." by Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 25, 1977.)
  
• This year, Coretta King, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s widow, pays a visit to the Democratic Speaker of the House, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neal and tells him: "I have to know what really happened to Martin." The Congressional Black Caucus then begins to put its considerable weight behind a proposed investigation of King's assassination.
  
• 1976 Tennessee journalist James Moore reveals he was given Top Secret documents by former CIA officials describing military mind control methods involving Radio-Hypnotic Intra-Cerebral Control and Electronic Dissolution of Memory.
  
• 1976 Walter Bowert publishes "Operation Mind Control". The public begins to be aware of government activities in this area.
  
• Larry McDonald, the 2nd president of the John Birch Society and a conservative Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives who represented the 7th congressional district of Georgia, wrote a forward for Allen's 1976 book The Rockefeller File, wherein he stated: "The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government, combining super-capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."
  
• While coffee prices were tripling in 1976, most Americans were led to believe it was due to a severe 1975 frost in Brazil. However, Congressman Frank Annunzio and others have suggested different causes of the coffee price spiral. "... the frost is significant," Annunzio said, "but is not, in my opinion, the factor pushing our prices toward four dollars a pound." (At this writing, coffee prices have exceeded $4.25 per pound.) Annunzio explains later that the Brazilian economy is in a shambles because its standard of living has risen remarkably in the past ten years, causing a demand for higher technology. Thus, Brazil now has a 28 billion dollar national debt and an import-export deficit of 2.3 billion in 1976. By withholding coffee and increasing prices, the Brazilian's debt can be paid off by the American consumer. Although other countries, such as Colombia, the Ivory Coast, and Nicaragua did not experience the frost damage in 1975, their prices are equally high. In addition, Brazil has bought coffee from some of these other countries to keep it off the market until prices have gone up. While it is not known how much of Brazil's stockpile has been depleted, there is as yet no evidence that there actually is a coffee shortage. Meanwhile, in January, 1977, the Coffee Association appropriated 18 million dollars for a worldwide promotional budget to add to their 45 million dollar advertising budget. Thus millions of dollars are being spent to persuade the American public to buy coffee at exorbitant prices due to an artificially created scarcity. The early media promulgation of the "frost" cause for high prices qualifies this story for consideration as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. (Congressman Frank Annunzio Congressional Record - House February 24, 1977, p H-1469,1470.)
  
• In "The Natural Gas Swindle," author/researcher Robert Sherrill reports illegal and unthical activities of gas companies, company connections with government agencies, and motives for creating a natural gas shortage. Illegalities mentioned include the evasion of seven major companies to produce natural gas supply information subpoenaed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the 100% increase in prices for new gas from 1972 to 1974, and the ownership of gas stock by nineteen key officials of the Federal Power Commission (FPC). Also noted is the failure of the FPC to issue injunctions against companies "sitting on" federal land leases, to report that gas companies greatly underestimated gas reserves, and to abide by its own mandate. The author contends that current shortages are "scare tactics" the companies are using to force deregulation of interstate gas supplies -- a legislative act which would produce windfall profits for the natural gas producing companies. Sherrill's article, suggesting the "gas shortage" was a hoax, appeared in January, 1976. In April, 1977, following one of the coldest winters in history which saw the public suffer unemployment, closed schools, and exorbitantly high heating costs, author/researcher Bethany Weidner repeated much of what Sherrill had said. Weidner also concluded the primary motive was the gas industry's goal of price deregulation. The lack of general public knowledge of how it was being "swindled" by the natural gas industry qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. (The Nation, January 24, 1976, p 70, "The Natural Gas Swindle," by Robert Sherrill; The Progressive, April, 1977, p 19, "What Natural Gas Shortage?" by Bethany Weidner.)
  
• Inefficiencies of nuclear safeguarding techniques and ambiguities concerning the accountability of nuclear materials poses a real threat to the safety of the American public ... and one of which they are little aware. Citing findings from a General Accounting Office report, the author/researcher, Barbara Newman, pointed out in the Nation several cases of inadequate safeguarding at nuclear plants -- including the use of employee honor systems in lieu of posted guards, the lack of effective security screening for new employees, and the strategic "outmanning" of perimeter sentry guards. Also noted is the lack of a credible inventory system to accurately tabulate amounts of uranium and plutonium.being processed. So lax is the current method that the government cannot account for 150,000 pounds of nuclear materials; 11,000 pounds of which is weapon-grade quality. For comparison, 4.4 pounds of plutonium is sufficient to make a bomb large enough to level a city of 100,000 people. Furthermore, any quantity of plutonium is a carcinogen and a lethal poison. In short, poor government management has allowed the security situation to degenerate to the point that nuclear supplies can be pilfered by employees, plants can be seized by terrorists, and private organizations involved with atomic energy go virtually unregulated. Corroborating Barbara Newman's 1976 warning is Jack Anderson's recent revelation of a secret inch-thick congressional study titled "Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguards." Prepared by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, it warns that mankind itself is threatened by an appalling lack of nuclear safeguards. The sparse coverage given our "missing plutonium" in 1976 qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories. ("Some of Our Plutonium is Missing" by Barbara P. Newman. Nation, Oct. 23, 1976. "Report warns nuclear theft danger real" by Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 27, 1977.)
  
• According to a conservative World Health Organization estimate, 500,000 people, the majority of them in Third World countries, are poisoned yearly by banned pesticides and drugs. Besides poisonings, a rash of miscarriages and birth defects have been attributed to certain banned herbicides. Although these chemicals are banned for use in the United States, domestic drug manufacturing corporations continue to produce and export them to foreign countries. Drugs never approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and even some never tested, are marketed and sold in some Third World countries. Moreover, they are shipped to countries that have minimal or no drug controls or regulations despite the fact the dangers of the products are known. What the peoples of those countries are being subjected to, and what the U.S. drug manufacturers are doing, goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in this country. The tragic impact of U.S. profit-motivated firms on the people of Third World nations qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. ("Banned Chemicals Shipped Abroad" by David Weir, Rolling Stone Magazine, February 10, 1977, No. 232.)
  
• Unemployment continued at high levels throughout the United States during 1976. Reasons given the public for the high unemployment rate ranged from a "soft economy" to the weather to increasing automation to lack of consumer demand. However, little attention was devoted to the impact of multinational corporations, MNC, on the work force within the nation. In early 1976, author/researcher Robert Cox reported that organized labor movements are seeking government controls over MNC's so as to stop the "export of jobs." While the MNC's reply to organized labor was that they were in fact creating more jobs at home, many of these "new Jobs" are unlikely to be available to displaced workers. Openings for systems analysts are not very helpful to auto assembly workers. Jobs lost and jobs created cannot be neatly balanced but have to be looked at in the more personal terms of the transferability of individuals with particular skills and habits. Authors Barnet and Muller had earlier exposed the fallacy of the MNC claim to creating new jobs. Between 1966 and 1970, according to a Department of Commerce study, the 298 U.S. based global firms had a 5.3% annual growth rate in employment overseas. During the same period, they had a growth rate in domestic employment of only 2.7%. By the end of 1970, more than 25% of all the employees of these U.S. based multinational corporations were employed outside the territory of the United States. The impact of MNC production in foreign countries on the unemployment picture in the U.S. qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. ("Labor and the Multinationals" by Robert Cox; Foreign Affairs, January 1976. Global Reach by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Simon Schuster, New York, 1974.)
  
• Artificially created life is a scientific reality. Since 1973, scientists at university laboratories across the country have been creating new life forms from the gene-carrying DNA of other organisms. The organisms thus created are called DNA Recombinants because they are literally recombined from the DNA of other simple bacteria or viruses. DNA researchers maintain that their work may lead to the creation of new, life-saving drugs, new food sources, and cures for cancer and other diseases. A number of prominent scientists do not agree. They say that DNA research amounts to dangerous tampering with the evolutionary balance, tampering that could result in the release of hordes of lethal new viruses which could not be detected until it was too late. Although the National Institute of Health has published guidelines for DNA research, opponents of DNA work state the NIH guidelines are hopelessly unenforceable and do not apply at all to private industry. The federal government appears willing to allow industry a free hand in creating new viruses, bacteria, and enzymes. A small-interagency committee was formed in November 1976 to look into the government's role in DNA research. Although that committee met privately, with no press coverage, sources inside the committee say that the government will probably adopt a set of lax, voluntary standards for industry, and will allow these firms to carry out their research secretly, in order to protect "trade information." And private industry is deeply involved in DNA research. At least six major pharmaceutical firms are at present engaging in Recombinant DNA work. General Electric has already applied for a patent on a new life form that will eat up oil spills. Although the debate over DNA reached a fever pitch in scientific circles in 1976, there was little if any media coverage on corporate DNA involvement and no public announcement by the government as to its policy on the matter. The lack of mass media coverage on this potentially catastrophic scientific endeavor qualifies the DNA story for nomination as one of the "best censored stories" of 1976. (Mother Jones Magazine, Feb/Mar, 1977, "DNA: Have the corporations already grabbed control of new life forms?" by Jeremy Rifkin. OTHER DNA SOURCES: Science Magazine, Oct. 15, 1976, "Recombinant DNA: A critic asks the right to free inquiry." See also Science Magazine -- July 23, 1976; Sept. 3, 1976; Sept. 24, 1976; Oct. 15, 1976; and Nov. 12, 1976 The Progressive Magazine, March 1977,"Life from the Labs: Who will control the new technology?" see also The Progressive Magazine, March 1977, "One small step beyond mankind.")
  
• CSICOP - The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal was formed in 1976 by Professor Paul Kurtz as a breakaway group from the American Humanist Association. Paul Kurtz, born in 1925, is now retired as a philosophy lecturer at New York University. Politically, he is a Social Democrat, part of the American Non-Communist Left through which the CIA channeled funding from large American foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller, to promote liberalism in Europe during the Cold War. Kurtz was concerned about the revival of Astrology in the US, and circulated a letter to leading scientists and academics collecting 186 signatures, including those of 18 Nobel Prize winners, to a manifesto called "Objections to Astrology", the publication of which brought about the formation of CSICOP. Soon afterwards, Kurtz held a press conference in New York to announce "a campaign to purge the media of occultist leanings" and to ensure "no TV programs dealing with parascience would go out unvetted by the appropriate authorities", i.e. CSICOP. Among its first members were science fiction writer Isaac Isimov, magician and showman James Randi, and astronomer and writer Professor Carl Sagan.
  

• 1/1976 Radical lawyer William Kunstler said that JFK and RFK had been "two of the most dangerous leaders in the country" and that he was "not entirely upset" by their deaths. This statement was prompted by recent revelations of wiretapping and assassination plots against Castro.
  
• 1/1976 Reagan and Ford were tied in the polls for the GOP nomination.
  
• 1/2/1976 Ford announced he would veto the common-situs picketing bill he had previously indicated he would sign.
  
• 1/3/1976 Ford vetoes common situs picketing bill.
  
• 1/4/1976 Flight attendants at National Airlines end a 127-day strike after signing a new contract.
  
• 1/7/1976 A Court of Appeals panel ruled that Congress' seizure of Nixon's tapes and papers was not unconstitutional.
  
• 1/7/1976 Richard Welch's funeral in Washington; great pomp to promote fallen CIA hero.
  
• 1/8/1976 China: Premier Zhou Enlai dies.
  
• 1/9/1976 Sen. Robert Byrd joined the presidential race.
  
• 1/11/1976 E. Howard Hunt testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about the charge that he had intended to kill Jack Anderson; Hunt testified that he had received orders from Colson to "get" Anderson, but only to drug him - not murder him. Hunt testified that he thought Colson's orders had originated with Nixon.
  
• 1/15/1976 Sara Jane Moore is sentenced to life in prison for attempting to assassinate Ford.
  
• 1/19/1976 Ford, in his State of the Union address, said, "in all that we do, we must be more honest with the American people..." He also proposed a "new realism" - giving more power to the states and local governments, and a larger defense budget. He also urged Congress to practice fiscal restraint to control inflation.
  
• 1/19/1976 Carter won the Iowa caucuses, a victory that was credited with starting him on the road to his near-sweep of the 1976 primaries. Tom Whitney, Iowa Democratic State Chairman, had told Hamilton Jordan to "forget about Iowa. It's not your kind of state." (Marathon, Witcover)
  
• 1/19/1976 Determined to finish his work by 31 January 1976, Pike pushed his committee for a final report. Searle Field at first hired Stanley Bach, a political scientist with some Hill experience, to write a draft report. Working primarily from the transcripts of the committee's hearings, Bach produced a rather balanced report not uncritical of the IC. The report called for the establishment of a joint intelligence oversight committee using the Joint Atomic Energy Committee as a model. Pike rejected the draft and assigned the responsibility for producing a satisfactory final report to Field and Aaron Donner. By early January, they had a draft. On 19 January, Field turned over a copy of the 338-page report for Agency review. He wanted it back by the close of business on 20 January. Rogovin responded with a scalding attack on the report. He criticized the extreme time constraints placed on the Agency in making its response and pictured the report as an "unrelenting indictment couched in biased, pejorative and factually erroneous terms." For Rogovin and most of the Agency, the report focused almost exclusively on negative matters and totally lacked balance. It gave the American public a distorted view of US intelligence, thereby "severely limiting its impact, credibility, and the important work of your committee." Despite Rogovin's protest, on 23 January 1976 the committee voted 9 to 7 along party lines to release its report with no substantial changes. The Republicans on the committee, strongly supported by the Agency and the White House, now led the fight to suppress the report. At the same time, Colby, fearing that the report would be released, called a press conference to denounce the committee and called the committee report "totally biased and a disservice to our nation." Colby claimed the report gave a thoroughly wrong impression of American intelligence.
  
• 1/21-23/1976 Kissinger meets with Brezhnev, Gromyko and other Soviet officials in Moscow over SALT.
  
• 1/26/1976 TIME magazine devoted four pages to MLK's assassination, drawing heavily from the soon-to-be published book by George McMillan, The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray (Little, Brown). In 1977 his wife, Priscilla McMillan, will publish Marina and Lee. Both books support the official version of the JFK and MLK assassinations. McMillan is the primary source for the widespread belief that Ray was a major drug dealer in Jeff City; that he smuggled large sums of money out of prison; that he used that money to finance his travels after his escape. McMillan's false scenarios portray Ray as a rabid racist in prison. "In 1963 and 1964 Martin Luther King was on TV almost every day, talking defiantly about how black people were going to get their rights, insisting that they would accept with nonviolence all the terrible violence that white people were inflicting on them, until the day of victory arrived, until they did overcome. Ray watched it all on the cell-block TV at Jeff City. He reacted as if King's remarks were directed at him personally. He boiled when King came on the tube. He began to call him Martin "Lucifer" King and Martin Luther "Coon." It got so that the very sight of King would galvanize Ray. "Somebody's gotta get him," Ray would say, his face drawn with tension, his fists clenched. "Somebody's gotta get him."" A fellow prisoner with Ray at Jefferson City, J.J. Maloney, later wrote: "Unfortunately, the scene described by McMillan could not have happened. There were no cellblock TVs in Jefferson City in 1963 and 1964. It wasn't until November 9, 1970--years after Ray escaped from Jefferson City--that inmates were allowed to purchase small black-and-white television sets, which they could keep in their cells. McMillan, and through him Time magazine, are also the primary sources for the general belief that Ray financed his after-escape activities with money earned in Jeff City."
  
• 1/26/1976 US vetoes a UN resolution on the Middle East.
  
• 1/26/1976 Unofficially supported by the CIA and the White House, McClory and the other Republicans took the fight to suppress the Pike Committee report to the House floor on 26 January 1976. McClory argued that the release of the report would endanger the national security of the United States. On the same day, The New York Times printed large sections of the draft report.
  
• 1/27/1976 Congress overrides Ford's veto of a $45 billion health and welfare bill.
  
• 1/29/1976 the House voted 246 to 124 to direct the Pike Committee not to release its report until it "has been certified by the President as not containing information which would adversely affect the intelligence activities of the CIA." Democratic Representative Wayne Hays seemed to reflect the basic feelings of the majority in the House when he commented just before the vote: "I will probably vote not to release it, because I do not know what is in it. On the other hand, let me say it has been leaked page by page, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph to The New York Times, but I suspect, and I do not know and this is what disturbs me, that when this report comes out it is going to be the biggest non-event since Brigitte Bardot, after 40 years and four husbands and numerous lovers, held a press conference to announce that she was no longer a virgin." Pike was bitter over the vote. He announced to the House, "The House just voted not to release a document it had not read. Our committee voted to release a document it had read." Pike was so upset that he threatened not to file a report at all with the House because "a report on the CIA in which the CIA would do the final rewrite would be a lie." Later, Pike reflected that "They, the White House, wanted to precensor our final report. This was unacceptable."
  
• 1/30/1976 Supreme Court rules that government financing of presidential campaigns and disclosure requirements are constitutional, but federally imposed limits on campaign spending are not.
  
• 1/30/1976 George H.W. Bush becomes CIA Director. Colby had been pushed out by Ford for being too cooperative with congressional investigators.
  
• 1/31/1976 Supreme Court rules that limits on political campaign spending are unconstitutional.
  
• 1/31/1976 According to Wayne Phillips, a former Times reporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger's name when it tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952 while he was studying at Columbia University's Russian Institute. Phillips said an Agency official told him that the CIA had "a working arrangement" with the publisher in which other reporters abroad had been placed on the Agency's payroll. Phillips, who remained at the Times until 1961, later obtained CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act which show that the Agency intended to develop him as a clandestine "asset" for use abroad. On January 31st, 1976, the Times carried a brief story describing the ClAs attempt to recruit Phillips. It quoted Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the present publisher, as follows: "I never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger." The Times story, written by John M. Crewdson, also reported that Arthur Hays Sulzberger told an unnamed former correspondent that he might he approached by the CIA after arriving at a new post abroad. Sulzberger told him that he was not "under any obligation to agree," the story said and that the publisher himself would be "happier" if he refused to cooperate. "But he left it sort of up to me," the Times quoted its former reporter as saying. "The message was if I really wanted to do that, okay, but he didn't think it appropriate for a Times correspondent" (Carl Bernstein)
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 2/1976 In an interview with Dick Russell of the Village Voice (published by Argosy magazine 3/1976) Chuck Colson stated, "I've heard one theory that there is no Howard Hughes, that it's really a headquarters of the Mafia's operation; that they owned Bebe Rebozo, they got their hooks into Nixon early, and, of course, that ties into the overlap of the CIA and the Mob...Don't say that's my theory, but I've heard it expounded as a possibility and, of course, it is."
  
• 2/1976 James Jesus Angleton appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and claimed he was unaware of the CIA-Mafia anti-Castro plots, but admitted that his colleague William Harvey had meetings with Mafia members at that time. (Report p69)
  
• 2/3/1976 In an attempt to pacify Pike, McClory on 3 February made a motion in committee "that Speaker Carl Albert be asked to submit the final report to President Ford so that it might be sanitized and released." The committee rejected this last effort at compromise by a vote of 7 to 4. Journalist Daniel Schorr then gave a copy of the entire Pike Report to The Village Voice, which published it in full on 16 February 1976 under the title "The Report on the CIA that President Ford Doesn't Want You to Read." When Schorr admitted that he leaked the report to The Village Voice, the House voted to have its Committee on Standards of Official Conduct investigate the leak. After extensive inquiry, it failed to find out who leaked the report. So ended the House investigation of the intelligence community.
  
• 2/4/1976 The swine flu scare began when state health authorities, conducting a routine check on a flu outbreak at the Fort Dix, New Jersey, Army base, found they could not identify the virus in some of the blood samples taken from the sick soldiers. Shortly thereafter, a barrage of conflicting information about swine flu and the mass immunization program was launched in the mass media. Early strong support for the immunization program from the administration and health authorities led to a number of people being inoculated. The widely publicized deaths of some of them, along with contradictory reports by other health authorities, led much of the nation to turn away from the inoculations. One outspoken critic of the flu program was J. Anthony Morris, a microbiologist with the Food and Drug Administration and a longtime critic of flu vaccines. He predicted that inoculation might result in hypersensitivity and trigger neurologic illnesses ranging from persistent headaches to encephalitis to paralysis to Guillain-Barre and to death. He was fired from the FDA by Commissioner Alexander Schmidt for "insubordination." Speculation was offered as to whether there was such a disease; whether it represented a grave threat to life, and whether or not the remedy was a greater danger than the illness. One group which was not confused by the conflicting information was the insurance companies who refused coverage to the four manufacturers of the swine flu serum. Federal Insurance Company, principal underwriter for the drug companies, explained to Business Insurance in May, 1976, that it was not convinced that there has been time enough to test the vaccine for side effects. Unfortunately for those who died or suffered paralysis following swine flu inoculations, the media message was not as clear. The swine flu snafu story is being nominated as a "censored" story of 1976 not because it did not receive enough media coverage, but because it received so much conflicting and inadequately-researched coverage, that the public was in the end left uninformed. SOURCES: (In addition to the following examples of contradictory media coverage, there was countless coverage of the swine flu problem in magazines and newspapers, and on radio and television.) Time, April 26, 1976: "Flap Over Swine Flu." New Times, June 11, 1976: "Sweating Out the Swine Flu Scare." Newsweek, July 12, 1976: "Swine Flu Snafu."
  
• 2/5/1976 Ford signed a railroad aid bill.
  
• 2/7/1976 Labor Department announces the unemployment rate date to 7.8% in January.
  
• 2/10/1976 Ford told the press that Nixon had not told him or anyone else in the government that he was going to China this year.
  
• 2/10/1976 Sen. Lloyd Bentsen drops out of the Presidential race.
  
• 2/11/1976 the Michael Paine phone conversation about Oswald is declassified.
  
• 2/12/1976 The Washington Star: The CIA has officially announced it will no longer hire newsmen working for American publications to serve as its eyes and ears around the world. It also promised, without identifying them, to phase out those newsmen currently maintaining ties to the intelligence agency. But it will continue to accept information from such sources voluntarily. The agency's announcement yesterday was the first time it had acted publicly to close the door on seeking out a specific source of intelligence gathering. The agency order noted that it also would bar recruitment within the clergy, but that, in fact there was no current ""secret or paid contractual relationship with any clergyman or missionary."" The action was taken, senior intelligence officials said, in response to growing criticism of the CIA's use of news media personnel and the buying of information from American newsmen. There also have been complaints from religious groups over reports that the CIA once used missionaries for intelligence gathering. It was the first public action of George Bush, the new CIA director. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson barred the CIA from secretly funding private American voluntary organizations. The agency was prohibited from recruiting agents from members of the Peace Corps by an executive order. In 1973, then-CIA director William Colby halted the secret retaining of five full-time journalists with major American publications and they were phased out by 1974, Colby publicly confirmed this year. But Bush's order goes far further. ""Effective immediately,"" a statement issued by the director's office said, the ""CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station."" The CIA statement said that the current news reporters with CIA ties would be phased out of the CIA connection ""as soon as feasible.""...A senior intelligence agency official told the New York Times that ""less than 20 persons will be effected by the order."" He said the order also would end the practice of sending CIA employes abroad under ""cover"" of being accredited representatives of American news organizations. The order, another official said, did not bar the CIA from recruiting employes of foreign news organizations. ""It is the agency's policy not to divulge the names of cooperating Americans. In this regard the CIA will not make public, now or in the future, the names of any cooperating journalists or churchmen,"" the statement said....The first strong indication that the CIA had infiltrated the American news media came in 1973 when Colby disclosed details to the Washington Star about use of 'stringers' and five staff reporters. These details were confirmed last month in a report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which has not been made public. The CIA has also formally refused to tell the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence the names of individual reporters or news organizations. During the past week, however, it has been charged that one intelligence officer posed as a CBS correspondent, that another CBS correspondent secretly fed information to the CIA and that an ABC correspondent in Hong Kong was recruited to help CIA officers contact a Chinese communist official. Executives for eight other of the nation's leading news organizations say the CIA assured that none of their reporters were among the full-time journalists said to be doubling as agents in 1973. However, most of these executives said they were unable to obtain similar assurances about CIA contacts with part-time journalists or stringers. Executives of the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS News said in recent interviews with the AP that they had received assurances from Colby that no one on their staffs was also on the CIA payroll following the November, 1973, story in the Star that revealed the extent of agency contacts with journalists. Colby has since acknowledged that he was the source of the story. The Washington Post said it had received similar assurances early this year. Executives of NBC News could not recall making an inquiry, while editors at United Press International said the CIA refused to respond to its initial request."
  
• 2/13/1976 General Murtala Ramat Mohammad, president of Nigeria, was killed by rebels during a coup attempt.
  
• 2/16-24/1976 Kissinger visits Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala to talk with their presidents on trade and other issues.
  
• 2/16/1976 House Intelligence (Pike) Committee's secret Final Report was published by the Village Voice after being leaked by CBS newsman Daniel Schorr. Ford and Kissinger had tried to suppress the report on the grounds of "national security." Rep. Otis Pike was head of the Committee. The report revealed that the CIA (in 1972 alone) "expended some $10 million in contributions to political parties" in Italy. It also disclosed that the CIA had disbursed payments to the Italians in 1972: "A major political party received $3.4 million; a political organization created and supported by CIA, $3.4 million; other organizations and parties, a total of $1.3 million." "It is known that during this period [1972] the President was indirectly approached by prominent international businessmen, who were former nationals of [Italy]. Their communications to the President were not available to the Committee." The Pike group's final report concluded that the foreign intelligence budget was three or four times larger than Congress had been told; that money appropriated for the IC was hidden throughout the entire Federal budget; that the total amount of funds expended on intelligence was extremely difficult to determine; and that Congressional and executive scrutiny of the budget ranged between "cursory and nonexistent." The report described the GAO as the auditing arm of Congress, but, when it came to the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, "it was no arm at all." The GAO was, the report found, prevented by security constraints from looking carefully into intelligence budgets. The end result, according to the report, was insufficient executive and legislative oversight. The committee also saw a "too cozy, almost inbred" relationship between the Office of Management and Budget officials and the intelligence budget makers. Taking on the issue of secrecy, the report argued that "taxpayers and most of Congress did not know and cannot find out how much they spend on spy activities." The committee saw this as being in direct conflict with the Constitution, which required a regular and public accounting for all funds spent by the Federal Government. The document then addressed Colby's argument that the Soviets would benefit enormously from disclosure. The report claimed that the Soviets probably already had a detailed account of US intelligence spending, far more than just the budget total. It concluded that "in all likelihood, the only people who care to know and do not know these costs are the American taxpayers." In addition, the report found that the DCI, who was nominally in charge of the entire Community budget, controlled only 15 percent of the total intelligence budget. The Secretary of Defense had much greater power and control over a greater portion of the intelligence budget than the DCI. The committee's final report also made it clear that the committee did not believe the CIA was out of control. It stated, "All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs."
  
• 2/17/1976 Ford announced a major reorganization of the intelligence community "with a comprehensive set of public guidelines" for all intelligence activities. He also would set up an independent "oversight board."
  
• 2/18/1976 Ford sent to the Senate for ratification a treaty with Spain providing for continuation of U.S. use of military bases in Spain.
  
• 2/19/1976 Ford issued executive order 11905, outlining new regulations on US foreign-intelligence activities. It limited the surveillance of US citizens.
  
• 2/20/1976 SEATO formally disbands.
  
• 2/25/1976 Goldwater, on Good Morning America, commented on ex-President Nixon's recent trip to China: "I don't think Mr. Nixon's visit to China did anything, and if he wanted to do this country a favor he might stay over here. He is violating the law...The Logan Act says no one but the President and the Secretary of State can discuss foreign policy..."
  
• 2/25/1976 Ford sent to Congress a special message proposing legislation to consolidate Medicaid and 15 categorical Federal health programs into a $10 billion block grant to the States.
  
• 2/26/1976 New Hampshire primary: Ford beats Reagan by 1,250 votes.
  
• 2/26/1976 Spain completes its withdrawal from Spanish Sahara, a former colonial territory in northeastern Africa. The next day, the people of the phosphate-rich desert territory proclaim the independent Saharan Arab Democratic Republic with Spanish approval.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 3/1976 Carter told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that the US should "coordinate" its policies with other nations.
  
• 3/1976 In Playboy, Dick Tuck talked about who the Democratic nominee would be. "Well, I can tell you who it won't be…Jimmy Carter will get a little run for his money, but I can't help but think that to most people he looks more like a kid in a bus station with his name pinned on his sweater on his way to summer camp than a President on his way to the White House."
  
• 3/2/1976 Anti-Castro leader Antonio Veciana reveals to Schweiker Subcommittee investigator Fonzi that a CIA masterspy named Maurice Bishop was his secret control officer, initiated the founding of Alpha 66, instigated two Castro assassination plots, and planned anti-Castro raids during the Cuban missile crisis. Veciana also reveals that he saw Bishop associating with Lee Harvey Oswald. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 3/6/1976 NY Times quoted Haig in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview saying that detente "can never be a substitute" for military strength.
  
• 3/9/1976 Carter easily beat Wallace in the Florida primary.
  
• 3/16/1976 State Dept halts US-Soviet talks because of Soviet involvement in Angola.
  
• 3/16/1976 British PM Harold Wilson resigned after being harassed by British intelligence agencies.
  
• 3/17/1976 Ford proposes legislation to virtually end Federal electronic surveillance of US citizens.
  
• 3/18/1976 Carter went public with his born-again Christianity, in a speech in Winston-Salem, North Carolina: "I spent more time on my knees the four years I was governor in the seclusion of a little private room off the governor's office than I did in all the rest of my life put together because I felt so heavily on my shoulders the decisions I made might very well affect many, many people. I recognized for the first time that I had lacked something very precious a complete commitment to Christ, a presence of the Holy Spirit in my life in a more profound and personal way."
  
• 3/19/1976 at a press conference, Carter said, "In 1967, I realized my own relationship with God was a very superficial one…I began to realize that my Christian life, which I had always professed to be preeminent, had really been a secondary interest in my life…"
  
• 3/20/1976 Patty Hearst is found guilty of armed robbery.
  
• 3/20/1976 Thai government orders US to close all its military installations in Thailand and withdraw all US personnel except for 270 military advisers.
  
• 3/24/1976 CIA sponsored coup in Argentina which overthrew the government of Isabel Peron.
  
• 3/26/1976 Kissinger and Turkish foreign minister Ihsan Sabri Caglayangil sign an accord allowing the reopening of US military installations in Turkey in return for military and economic assistance.
  
• 3/27/1976 Ford declared today he will not "play Russian roulette" with national security by allowing Congressional Democrats to cut his military spending.
  
• 3/29/1976 Supreme Court rules 6-3 that states may outlaw homosexual acts, even if committed in private by consenting adults.
  
• 3/30-31/1976 King Hussein of Jordan visits Washington.
  
• 3/30/1976 Ford threatens to veto any military spending bill he believes is inadequate.
  
• 3/31/1976 Reagan made a nationally televised speech attacking the policies of the Ford administration: "Now, we are told Washington is dropping the word "detente, " but keeping the policy. But whatever it's called, the policy is what's at fault. What is our policy? Mr. Ford's new Ambassador to the United Nations attacks our longtime ally, Israel. In Asia, our new relationship with mainland China can have practical benefits for both sides. But that doesn't mean it should include yielding to demands by them, as the administration has, to reduce our military presence on Taiwan where we have a longtime friend and ally, the Republic of China. And, it's also revealed now that we seek to establish friendly relations with Hanoi. To make it more palatable, we're told that this might help us learn the fate of the men still listed as Missing in Action. Well, there's no doubt our government has an obligation to end the agony of parents, wives and children who've lived so long with uncertainty. But, this should have been one of our first demands of Hanoi's patron saint, the Soviet Union, if detente had any meaning at all. To present it now as a reason for friendship with those who have already violated their promise to provide such information is hypocrisy. In the last few days, Mr. Ford and Dr. Kissinger have taken us from hinting at invasion of Cuba, to laughing it off as a ridiculous idea. Except, that it was their ridiculous idea. No one else suggested it. Once again what is their policy? During this last year, they carried on a campaign to befriend Castro. They persuaded the Organization of American States to lift its trade embargo, lifted some of the U.S. trade restrictions. They engaged in cultural exchanges. And then, on the eve of the Florida primary election, Mr. Ford went to Florida, called Castro an outlaw and said he'd never recognize him…The Soviet Army outnumbers ours more than two-to-one and in reserves four-to-one. They out-spend us on weapons by 50 percent. Their Navy outnumbers ours in surface ships and submarines two-to-one. We're outgunned in artillery three-to-one and their tanks outnumber ours four-to-one. Their strategic nuclear missiles are larger, more powerful and more numerous than ours. The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best."
  
• 4/1976 China: thousands of people gather in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Chou En-Lai and criticize Mao's closest associates. Clashes between mourners and police result in the "Tiananmen Incident," which the government brands as a counter-revolutionary event.
  
• 4/1/1976 A last-minute settlement averts a NYC subway and bus strike.
  
• 4/2/1976 What is Project Desktop? Anyone who knows certainly isn't talking and those who have divulged some information have been silenced, in some way, by the government. According to various sources, Desktop could be an underwater missile system in direct violation with the SALT talks, the Seabed Treaty, and the U.S. Constitution; a Pentagon-White House spy ring; or an underwater intelligence system directed towards foreign countries. The government does admit Desktop is/was an actual program dealing with the highest level of national security and operated by the Navy. Evidence gathered to unravel the mystery is confusing, fragmented, and contradictory. However, there are two indisputable facts: Desktop is real, and it scares those who share its secret. Author/ researcher Michael Drosnin painstakingly documents his futile efforts to unravel Project Desktop in his article. The many censoring devices used to silence Drosnin's sources qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: New Times, April 2, 1976, p.21, "A Military Mystery Story: Desktop" by Michael Drosnin.
  
• 4/3/1976 the trucking industry and the Teamsters end a three-day strike by signing a new contract.
  
• 4/5/1976 Howard Hughes died.
  
• 4/5/1976 FBI documents, released in response to a freedom of information suit, revealed that the government mounted an intensive campaign against civil rights organizations in the sixties. In a letter dated August 25, 1967, the FBI said the government operation, called COINTELPRO, was designed "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalists, hate-type groups, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorders." A later telegram specifically named the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as organizations having "radical and violence prone leaders, members and followers."
  
• 4/6/1976 Colson testified that he had ordered no one to do anything to Jack Anderson; while he "never heard anyone discuss any plan to kill Jack Anderson," he couldn't "discount the possibility of having said something in jest" along those lines. Colson said that Nixon had asked him "many times" to do something to "discredit" Anderson. The Committee decided that the Colson-Hunt meeting took place 3/14/1972 and that Hunt and Liddy then met with a former CIA physician at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington to discuss various non-traceable drugs: "According to Hunt, they discussed various means of administering a drug: painting the steering wheel of a car 'for absorption through the palms of the hands,' switching bottles in a medicine cabinet, or dropping a pill into a cocktail." (Report 134-37) Victor Lasky wrote: "But an investigation of the story by the Senate Intelligence Committee produced 'no evidence of a plan to assassinate Jack Anderson.' The committee did ascertain that an effort had been made by Hunt to determine the possibility of drugging Anderson so as to render him incoherent before a public appearance. When Hunt learned of the impracticality of the venture, the matter was dropped. The question was whether Hunt had acted on the order of Colson. This Colson flatly denied. However he recalled Hunt 'on a couple of occasions coming to me with some hare-brained schemes, something to do with drugging involving Jack Anderson.' But he said he never authorized any such project. And there is no independent evidence he did." (It Didn't Start with Watergate 362-3)
  
• 4/7/1976 Bruce Wagner memo to Rogers Morton on Ford campaign tactics: "Ronald Reagan must not be mentioned or singled-out of the group of Presidential aspirants, but it must be implied that: He is an irresponsible and ambitious man. He has sacrificed his principles for ambition. He must be depicted as naive. He would commit our young men to another "Vietnam war" in Africa or elsewhere. His "eyeball-to-eyeball" diplomacy really means nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. In a nutshell, we must go for the jugular and eliminate,the credibility of the Reagan candidacy...The Texas Primary offers us the opportunity to cut the Reagan candidacy down once and for all."
  
• 4/9/1976 Phil Ochs, folk singer/songwriter and political activist, was found hanged in his sister's home in Far Rockaway, New York on April 9, 1976. Throughout his life, Ochs was one of the most overtly political of the 1960s rock and folk music stars. A regular attendee at anti-war, civil rights, and labor rallies, Ochs appeared to be, at all times, an unwavering political leftist (he named his first band The Singing Socialists). That all changed, however, and rather dramatically, in the months before his death. Born in El Paso, Texas on December 19, 1940, Phil and his family moved frequently during the first few years of his life. His father, Dr. Jacob Ochs, had been drafted by the US Army and assigned to various military hospitals in New York, New Mexico and Texas. In 1943, Dr. Ochs was shipped overseas, returning two years later with a medical discharge. Upon his return, he was immediately institutionalized and didn't return to his family for another two years. During that time, he was subjected to every treatment' imaginable, including electroshock therapy.' When he finally returned to his family, in 1947, he was but a shell of his former self, described by Phil's sister as "almost like a phantom." Beginning in the fall of 1956, Phil Ochs began attending Staunton Military Academy, the very same institution that future serial killer'/cult leader Gary Heidnik would attend just one year after Ochs graduated. During Phil's two years there, a friend and fellow band member was found swinging from the end of a rope (I probably don't need to add here that the death was ruled a suicide). Following graduation, Phil enrolled at Ohio State University, but not before, oddly enough, having a little plastic surgery done to alter his appearance (doing such things, needless to say, was rather uncommon in 1958). In early 1962, just months before his scheduled graduation, Ochs dropped out of college to pursue a career in music. By 1966, he had released three albums. In 1967, under the management of his brother, Michael Ochs, Phil moved out to Los Angeles. Michael had begun working the previous year as an assistant to Barry James, who maintained a party house at 8504 Ridpath in Laurel Canyon. In the early 1970s, with his career beginning to fade, Phil Ochs began to travel internationally, usually accompanied by vast quantities of booze and pills. Those travels included a visit to Chile, not long before the US-sponsored coup that toppled Salvador Allende. In early summer of 1975, Phil Ochs' public persona abruptly changed. Using the name John Butler Train, Ochs proclaimed himself to be a CIA operative and presented himself as a belligerent, right-wing thug. He told an interviewer that, "on the first day of summer 1975, Phil Ochs was murdered in the Chelsea Hotel by John Train … For the good of societies, public and secret, he needed to be gotten rid of." That symbolic assassination, on the summer solstice, took place at the same hotel that Devon Wilson had flown out of a few years earlier. One of Ochs' biographers would later write that Phil/John "actually believed he was a member of the CIA." Also in those final months of his life, Ochs began compiling curious lists, with entries that clearly were references to US biological warfare research: "shellfish toxin, Fort Dietrich, cobra venom, Chantilly Race Track, hollow silver dollars, New York Cornell Hospital …" Many years before Ochs' metamorphosis, in an interesting bit of foreshadowing, psychological warfare operative George Estabrooks explained how US intelligence agencies could create the perfect spy: "We start with an excellent subject … we need a man or woman who is highly intelligent and physically tough. Then we start to develop a case of multiple personality through hypnotism. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to the authorities. Note that he will be acting in good faith. He is a communist, or rather his PA is a communist and will behave as such. Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality, if you wish, although this is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. This personality is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by PA, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage … My super spy plays his role as a communist in his waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge those memories." Estabrooks never explained what would happen if the programming were to go haywire and Personality B were to become the conscious personality, but my guess is that such a person would be considered a severe liability and would be treated accordingly. They might even be find themselves swinging from the end of a rope. Phil Ochs was thirty-five at the time of his death.
  
• 4/11/1976 Sen. Richard Schweiker discovers that a police artist's sketch of Maurice Bishop looks very much like a high-ranking retired CIA officer who had testified before the Church Intelligence Committee. His name is David Atlee Phillips. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 4/11/1976 It seems to be "news" when a state fails to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.). However, a report which suggested a national conspiracy to stop the E.R.A. did not seem to be news. An article, reviewing the report made by the National Organization for Women (which supports the E.R.A.), was buried in Part IV, page 120, of the April 11, 1976, issue of the New York Times. The article said, in part: "Stop E.R.A. leader Phyllis Schlafly talks of passing the hat for nickels and dimes to finance the movement, but it can hardly be so homespun. Among E.R.A. proponents,. there has. been much speculation that a helping hand comes from segments of the insurance industry, whose sex-differentiated practices might come under severe scrutiny if the amendment were passed. A NOW report traces in great detail a web of alleged interconnections among Schlafly, the John Birch Society, and a number of insurance company executives. NOW vice president for legislation, Elaine Latourell, whose office helped prepare the report says: "The industry giants are out to crush the E.R.A. We see connections winding covertly from their corporation board rooms, through their law firms, through their right wing leaders, through wives of insurance executives who crop up as heads of local anti-E.R.A. committees, through state legislators' offices, and back to insurance companies." She says that insurance lobbyists fought the E.R.A. heavily in Nebraska, Illinois, and Oklahoma. The main problem for insurance companies, if the E.R.A. should be ratified, appears to be their sex-differentiated practices in disability insurance and pension plans. The failure of the media to give equal coverage to the NOW report qualifies the report for consideration as on of the "best censored" stories of 1976.
  
• 4/12/1976 Patty Hearst is sentenced to 25 years in prison for her conviction on bank robbery charges and 10 years for using a weapon while committing a felony.
  
• 4/13/1976 Kissinger warned that Communist success in any West European country would result in a negative reaction from the US.
  
• 4/13/1976 Only days after police receive a message that another exile leader will die during Easter week, Ramon Donestevez, a liberal who has sailed to Cuba several times trying to gain the release of political prisoners, is found shot through the head in his boatyard. Dr. Orlando Bosch is thought to be responsible. Bosch is active in forging Cuban exile ties to the right-wing international terrorist network.
  
• 4/16/1976 Ford resolves inter-agency dispute in favor of a fast buildup of the country's first strategic oil reserve as a protection against another foreign embargo.
  
• 4/17/1976 a black legislator from Georgia, Julian Bond, wrote in The Nation that as a candidate for governor, "Carter courted the Wallace vote and said nice things about Lester Maddox…Carter let Georgia's white voters know he could win without a single black vote.' He won the primary with less than 10 percent of that vote." At the June 1972 Democratic Governors' Conference, Carter introduced resolutions urging that Vietnam not be an issue in the 1972 campaign, praising J. Edgar Hoover for his national service, and urging the racist governors of Mississippi and Alabama to come back to the Democratic party."
  
• 4/20/1976 Supreme Court rules that federal courts can order low-income public housing to be located in white suburbs.
  
• 4/20/1976 GNP for first quarter of 1976 has 7.5% growth, with inflation at 3.7%.
  
• 4/20/1976 "Ramos" -- Felix I. Rodriguez, the CIA agent who orchestrated the hunt for Che Guevara in Bolivia, retires. A brief ceremony, during which he is awarded the Intelligence Star for Valor, is held in him Miami home. He has refused to accept it from CIA Director George Bush at Langley because he considers Bush a political appointee who is still wet behind the ears when it comes to covert actions.
  
• 4/23/1976 At a top secret hearing held in a suite at the Carroll Arms Hotel in Washington, Johnny Roselli tells representatives of the Church Committee and Senator Richard Schweiker he believes Cubans associated with Fidel Castro and Santos Trafficante were behind the assassination of JFK. Senator Schweiker then asks him whether he knew about Trafficante meeting Jack Ruby in Havana, and Roselli tells him he knows about the meeting, that Ruby and Trafficante knew each other.
  
• 4/26/1976 the Church Committee report issued. Senate Select (Church) Committee on Intelligence Activities ends a 15-month investigation into the activities of the CIA, FBI, IRS and the Army and their infringement of the rights of citizens. The Committee recommends Congressional legislation to restrict future abuses. The Committee charged that the FBI had conducted illegal investigations into politicians and political groups who dissented against the government's policies.