Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1976 US House Banking and Currency Committee Report, May 1976, entitled "International Banking", identifies the Rothschild Five Arrows Group and its five branches: N.M.Rothschild & Sons, Ltd in London, Banque Rothschild in France, Banque Lambert in Belgium, New Court Securities in New York, and Pierson, Holding & Company in Amsterdam, all of which were combined into Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, Ltd, who in turn has three American subsidiaries: National City Bank of Cleveland, First City National Bank (First City Bancorp) in Houston, and First National Bank in Seattle. First City Bancorp in Houston would co-chair the Reagan Bush campaign of 1980. The House Report also noted "the Rothschild banks are affiliated with Manufacturers Hanover of London and Manufacturers Hanover in New York, which buys CIT Financial Corporation in 1983 for $1.6 billion.
  
• 5/1976 Carter told the US Chamber of Commerce that the US needed a "commitment" to the Trilateral Commission's goals.
  
• 5/1/1976 Texas GOP primary; Ford lost by a huge margin to Reagan, who had charged the president with being soft on defense. Ford accused Reagan of raising "false alarms" and said he was so "simplistic" that as president he would make "irresponsible and fundamentally harmful policy decisions."
  
• 5/7/1976 Sec. of Treasury William Simon visited Pinochet in Chile; he praised him for the country's commitment to a free-market economy. In return, the Chileans released a token amount of political prisoners. Kissinger visited Chile in June, and both he and Simon declared that the country had improved its human rights policies. Actually, this was not the case.
  
• 5/7/1976 Sen. Goldwater letter to Ford: "You are the President. Do not stupe to arguing with another candidate. Your speeches are a little bit too long. Get a good speech that is short and use it and use it and use it. Reagan's trick, as you know, is to have a whole handful of cards and he shuffles out whatever comes out to be ten minutes of speaking, and I don't think this deck has changed much over the years. Your speech writer has to be more punchy. It has to sound like you and no matter how much you have to rehearse it do it. You are not going to get the Reagan vote. These are the same people who got me the nomination and they will never swerve, but ninety per cent of them will vote for you for President, so get after middle America. They have never had it so good. They are making more money and they are not at war and, for God's sake, get off of Panama, but don't let Reagan off that hook."
  
• 5/14/1976 Ford urges Congress to adopt timetable for fundamental and extensive reform of government's regulatory program and agencies.
  
• 5/16/1976 on Face the Nation, Sen. Walter Mondale (a member of the Church Committee) said he felt that the CIA and FBI had done poorly in working with the WC, and his committee had found "quite significant" leads in the Kennedy case.
  
• 5/18/1976 Ford officially revises Federal Elections Commission clearing way for resumption of Federal campaign subsidies.
  
• 5/18/9176 Ford bounces back from a string of primary losses with victories in Michigan and Maryland.
  
• 5/19/1976 Congress sets up a permanent 15-member board to oversee the intelligence agencies.
  
• 5/20/1976 "The Miami News: New leads into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy involve Lee Harvey Oswald's connections with both pro-Communist and anti-Communist Cuban groups, The Miami News has learned. A spokesman for Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-Pa.), heading a Senate subcommittee probing the assassination, said new leads developed by investigators who had been in Miami were the dominant factor in the formation of a permanent panel to restudy the murder. The spokesman said Miami has now become one of several focal points in the investigation. He said the investigators had been looking into Oswald's connections ""with both anti-Castro Cubans who blamed Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and pro-Castro Cubans."" A report on the new developments will be completed in two weeks, the spokesman for Schweiker said. The Senate Intelligence Committee has criticized the CIA for not disclosing to the Warren Commission several assassination plots against Cuban Premier Fidel Castro attempted by the agency during the Kennedy era, attempts which could have provided pro-Castro Communists with a motive to get rid of Kennedy. There is no question that both the FBI and the CIA lied to the Warren Commission. the spokesman said. He added that the CIA also hid from the Warren Commission a Secret Service report on a Cuban refugee opposed to Castro and known to be violently anti-Kennedy as well, who had been trying to buy bazookas and machine guns in Dallas shortly before the President's death. According to the Senate committee, Oswald infiltrated an anti- Castro Cuban group in New Orleans before he started his own phony pro-Castro organization the ""Fair Play for Cuba Committee, "" under which he distributed propaganda favorable to Castro. Oswald lived in New Orleans from April to September 1963. He clashed with anti-Castro Cuban exiles there during the summer preceding the assassination. Yesterday, anti-Castro Cubans in Miami vehemently denied any links to Oswald. When Kennedy was killed, Cuban exiles here who were active against Castro had not yet lost faith in the President, said Carlos Prio, the only surviving former president of Cuba, who now lives in Miami. ""Cubans were still waiting for Kennedy to fulfill his promise to help free Cuba. According to Prio and other exile leaders, the most numerous and significant CIA operations and other U.S. supported activities against Castro ever launched from U.S. soil occurred during the Kennedy period after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt. The operations grew both in intensity and number even after the October 1962 missile crisis and the peace pact Kennedy allegedly signed with Soviet leaders at that time, promising that no anti- Castro attacks would be launched from U.S. soil. These operations began to be phased out under the late President Lyndon Johnson. The phase-out of all covert CIA military actions against Cuba from Miami was completed during President Richard Nixon's first term. Anti-Castro Cubans believe that Oswald was part of a pro-Castro conspiracy. The belief is that Castro found out the U.S. --under Kennedy-- was trying to assassinate him and he tried the same tactic, except he was more efficient, said a former CIA agent involved in commando raids against Cuba before and after the Bay of Pigs."
  
• 5/20-21/1976 NATO holds its semiannual meeting in Oslo, Norway.
  
• 5/24/1976 British-French supersonic Concorde jetliner begins service to Dulles International Airport.
  
• 5/25/1976 Ford defeats Reagan in Kentucky, Tennessee and Oregon; Carter wins the primaries in Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky.
  
• 5/28/1976 Treaty on Underground Nuclear Explosions is signed by US and USSR; this would control and limit the number of underground nuclear tests.
  
• 5/30/1976 Ford strongly defended the WC to the Washington Post; he believed the WC "got full cooperation of all federal agencies at that time." He said he saw no reason to question the performance of either the CIA or FBI in the investigation.
  
• 6/1976 While accurate and current statistics from different sources tend to vary, they do agree on one thing -- more than twice as many American Vietnam veterans have died after returning home than were killed in the fourteen years of actual combat. The estimated number of actual combat deaths ranges from 45,806 to 46,520. Data from the Veterans Administration (VA), dated June, 1976, reveals that 101,000 Vietnam veterans have died since returning to civilian life. According to a report for Ralph Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law, "Although reliable statistics are not available, suicide appears to be one of the leading causes of deaths among Vietnam veterans in general, and disabled veterans in particular. One other cause rivaling suicide is drug use and the two have much in common -- an overwhelming desire for surcease from pain." While the problems of Vietnamese refugees in America received widespread publicity, the problems of America's returning veterans did not receive comparable coverage. The untold, but continuing story of the tragedy of America's Vietnam veterans qualifies this for nomination as one of the "censored" stories of 1976.
  
• Britain plotted to support a coup d'etat in Rome in 1976 because of grave fears that the Italian Communist Party would win the election and form a government, according to declassified documents. The papers, uncovered by an Italian researcher at the National Archives at Kew, reveal a flurry of anxious correspondence between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and its diplomats, as well as with Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, European officials in Brussels and even the Vatican in the months before the election. One paper dated May 6, 1976 when James Callaghan was the Labour Prime Minister from the planning staff of the Foreign Office, is entitled Action in Support of a Coup d'etat or Other Subversive Action. It says: "By its nature a coup is likely to be an unexpected development, but theoretically a coup could be promoted . . . it would presumably come from the right wing drawing in the army and the police." Last night Sir Guy Millard, 90, who was the British Ambassador to Rome between 1974 and 1976, told The Times that he knew nothing of a coup plot. "I never thought the Communists would win the election because the Italians would have been scared of separating themselves from the Americans," he said. Sir Guy left Rome in October 1976, four months after the Italian elections when the Communists were just pipped at the post, winning 34.3 per cent of the vote, compared with 38.7 per cent for the Christian Democrats. "If there was a plot to mount a coup the Foreign Office never told me, but then it would have been so secret that they wouldn't have wanted diplomats to know about it," he said. "It may be that the CIA was planning something, and if the CIA was involved, SIS [Secret Intelligence Service, MI6] may have been conscious of it, but I knew nothing about it. Communism in Italy, you know, was a pretty mild variety. We called it Eurocommunism, and the ones I met seemed most civilised." According to the documents, senior officials in the Foreign Office thought otherwise. Aldo Moro, the Christian Democrat leader who was assassinated two years later by the Red Brigades terrorist group, was the head of a weak government and the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) had made significant gains in administrative elections. Parliamentary voting was scheduled for June 1976, and the possibility that the PCI would garner more votes than the Christian Democrats was real. The Foreign Office believed that a Communist presence in the Italian Government "could turn out to be an event with catastrophic consequences", especially for Nato and the European Economic Community. The contents of the declassified documents appeared in yesterday's La Repubblica newspaper. The CIA had set up a secret network in Italy many years before the 1976 election to prepare for the possibility of a Communist takeover in Rome. It was called Operation Gladio. American documents declassified in the 1970s revealed that the chief of Italian military intelligence had joined the US in the 1950s in preparing a plan against a Communist takeover. MI6 and other Nato intelligence agencies were thought to have been involved. The National Archives documents reveal for the first time that the Foreign Office contemplated having to give its backing to a coup. In one, dated April 13, 1976, the Western European department of the Foreign Office offered a variety of possible approaches to the Communist problem. Some proposed ways to avoid a victory of the party, headed by the popular Enrico Berlinguer, including financing opposing parties, and a media blitz about the dangers of Communism, thus discrediting the PCI. Other documents addressed the prospect of the Communist Party in government: "Option No 4: subversive or military intervention against the PCI." There was talk of financial support to "democratic forces" to "direct intervention in support of a coup encouraged from outside". (Britain joined plot to overthrow a Communist Italian government From The Times January 14, 2008)
  
• 6/1976 Carter announced that "the time has come for us to seek a partnership between North America, Western Europe and Japan."
  
• 6/1976 it was disclosed that in a late 12/1963 meeting James J. Angleton had proposed being allowed to take over CIA responsibility for dealing with the WC probe. Richard Helms agreed to it. (Report p31) "It is important to note that Mr Angleton testified that he was often in contact with Dulles after the latter had left the Agency. Angleton testified that Dulles consulted with him before agreeing to President Johnson's request that he be on the Commission and that he was in frequent contact with Dulles. Angleton had also indicated that he and Dulles informally discussed the progress of the Commission's investigation and that Dulles consulted with him about what further investigation the CIA could do..." (Report p69)
  
• 6/1976 Britain: unemployment reached 6.4%, the worst since 1940.
  
• 6/1976 Garry Wills wrote in The Atlantic: "There is concern over Carter's religion that is not mere bigotry. It may seem unjust to punish real religion when we reward empty religiosity; but the thing makes sense…when a man means what he says in this awesome area, he drifts outside the ties and shared weaknesses that keep us in touch with each other."
  
• 6/1976 This month, George de Mohrenschildt completes a manuscript which he claims names names. "That's when disaster struck. You see, in that book I played the devil's advocate. Without directly implicating myself as an accomplice in the JFK assassination I still mentioned a number of names, particularly of FBI and CIA officials who apparently may not be exposed under any circumstances. I was drugged surreptitiously. As a result I was committed to a mental hospital ..."
  
• 6/2/1976 Don Bolles was permanently "censored" as an investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic when his car exploded in the parking lot of the Hotel Chardon in Phoenix. As he had been for more than ten years, Bolles was investigating a new lead dealing with massive land frauds, political payoffs, the underworld, and corporate crime. While Bolles was silenced, the story he was working on was not. A group of 36 reporter and editor volunteers, called the Investigation Reporters and Editors, Inc., spent six months investigating land fraud, gambling, prostitutions, illegal labor activities, and other subjects following the bombing murder of Bolles. The IRE started publishing their findings through United Press International in March, 1977. The Bolles' story is being nominated as one of the "best censored stories" of 1976 since it is a classic example of a form of violent censorship which still takes place in the United States.
  
• 6/3/1976 AFL-CIO Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union is established when the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Textile Workers Union merge.
  
• 6/5/1976 US unemployment rate is at 7.3%.
  
• 6/8/1976 CIA's William Harvey dies after heart surgery. Of all the CIA players involved in the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, William "Bill" Harvey is a major key. He is 60 years old. Harvey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he had been told by superiors that the Castro assassination plots had been approved at the highest levels of government (meaning the Presidency), and that he had discussed the efforts with his immediate superior, Richard Helms, who later became Director of the Agency. A CIA officer says Harvey was "asked to do things that nobody should have been asked to do." Harvey's widow, railing against "that awful Frank Church", says that her husband was clearly the chosen scapegoat in the assassination plots against Castro.
  
• 6/13/1976 Washington Post reported that Lucien Conein had admitted in an interview to having close ties to the Corsican Mafia while in Vietnam in the early '60s.
  
• 6/14/1976 Sen. Frank Church withdraws from the presidential race.
  
• 6/16/1976 The Senate passed a bill to cut off military aid to Chile. Orlando Letelier's lobbying for the provision was key to its success.
  
• 6/16/1976 Frank Fitzsimmons was reelected president of the Teamsters Union.
  
• 6/16/1976 Brezhnev is made chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
  
• 6/16/1976 US ambassador to Lebanon Francis E. Meloy Jr. and his economic counselor Robert O. Warwick are kidnapped and shot to death in Beirut.
  
• 6/21/9716 Very simply, the story is: "Single-handedly, America's fifth largest corporation is keeping alive a regime that has been not only embargoed but condemned by virtually every nation on earth." The corporation is Mobil Oil; the nation is Rhodesia. The story was released, with supporting documentation, at a press conference held by the People's Bicentennial Commission (PBC) in Washington, D.C., June 21, 1976. Attending the press conference were more that 40 reporters from America's major papers, all three networks, the wire services, along with radio and freelance people. On the same day, the PBC turned the documentation over to the Treasury Department, the House and Senate Committees on Africa, and Senator Frank Church's subcommittee on multinationals. The only extensive coverage occurred six weeks later when the N.Y. Times broke the story, announcing that the Treasury had begun its investigation of the PBC charges. But unless you saw that story or a short story subsequently carried by AP, you would-be unaware of the Mobil Oil/ Rhodesian connection. None of the networks, not Time and Newsweek, gave coverage to the story. The story charged that Mobil, by developing a string of dummy companies, post office addresses, and phony order sheets and invoices was able to set up a circuitous "paper chase" thereby disguising the fact that Mobil was selling Rhodesia as much as $ 20 million a year in oil products, including specialized aviation fuel for Rhodesia's air force. When asked about the lack of coverage on the story, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times said: "Look, Mobil may have been subjected to higher standards than 99 percent of the news stories we run, but hell, nobody wants to take on Mobil Oil without fucking good grounds. I'd be a fool not to say that Mobil is a big national advertiser." The apparent media self-censorship which occurred with this story qualifies it to be considered for one of the "ten best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: "Let's Make A Deal" by Richard Parker, editor, Mother Jones, September/October 1976.
  
• 6/21/1976 Kissinger addresses the annual ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
  
• 6/23/1976 Washington Star reported Haldeman saying, "If I had seen Dean's FBI dossier it would have barred him from the White House. Allegations about a conflict-of-interest charge...involving his prior affiliation with a law firm would have been enough to concern me..."
  
• 6/23-24/1976 Kissinger talks with South African PM John Vorster in West Germany.
  
• 6/23/1976 Church Committee released its Report on The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies. It faulted Hoover and the FBI for not cooperating with the WC and for quickly presuming Oswald's guilt. Senator Richard Schweiker, on the subcommittee investigating foreign assassinations, says today: "The American people were denied the truth about the Vietnam war, the Cambodian bombing, and Watergate. I do not think we yet know the whole truth about the Kennedy assassination."
  
• 6/24/1976 Supreme Court rules that federal minimum wage laws are not binding on state and local governments.
  
• 6/24/1976 Ford sends sweeping busing legislation to Congress.
  
• 6/24/1976 Washington Post story on the Church report by George Lardner Jr.
  
• 6/24/1976 Chicago Sun Times quoted Thomas Mann who said that RFK had ordered the CIA to stop investigating Oswald's ties to Castro just days after the assassination.
  
• 6/25/1976 In 1975, American consumers spent $6,728,270,000 on cosmetics and toiletries. And while millions of these consumers were using these cosmetics and toiletries daily, few of them were aware of how hazardous they may be to their health. Author/researcher Chris Welles states "The awful truth is that despite their enticing and beguiling appearance, they may be secretly and quietly destroying us." Sixty percent of the substance enters a person's system and may very possibly be a cause of diseases as serious as cancer. The lack of information on the effects of the chemicals in some of America's most widely used cosmetics is appalling. Heinz Eiermann, of the Food and Drug Administration, says "The trouble is, not only can't I stop it but I often don't even know the product exists. We don't have authority to require anything." Considering the national advertising budget of the cosmetics and toiletries industry, it is not surprising the mass media have done so little to warn the consumer of the potential dangers of the products. Or, as the author of the article puts it, "Why do we have to kill or maim our way to consumer legislation reform?" The widespread use of these products, combined with their potential dangers to the user and the inadequate protection from the FDA, qualifies this story for nomination as a "best censored" story of 1976. SOURCE: New Times Magazine, June 25, 1976, p 42, "Warning: Cosmetics May Be Hazardous To Your Health," by Chris Welles.
  
• 6/25/1976 Washington Star reported that Johnson had told Joseph Califano he thought that Castro was responsible for the assassination: "Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first." Johnson said the same thing to Howard K. Smith.
  
• 6/27/1976 Ford hosts Economic Summit in Puerto Rico.
  
• 6/27/1976 Senator Richard Schweider said on CBS 'Face the Nation' that his work during the last 18 months indicates that there is need to look into the role which Lyndon Johnson's White House played in the Warren Commission's investigation. He cited the specific possibility of cover up by people high in the Johnson White House and State Department. The behavior of Lyndon Johnson's White House during the summer of 1964 is indeed mysterious if it is looked at in light of the fact that Lyndon Johnson was anxious to hurry the Report on John F. Kennedy's assassination to a conclusion before the November elections. Also questionable are the actions of LBJ's White House and the strange behavior it pursued against Robert Kennedy who at that time was Attorney General…Mysteriously, however, neither Johnson nor Yarborough were called to testify before the Warren Commission - only written disposition was asked for. Yarborough has stated that he was repeatedly pressured in the summer of 1964 by nervous and demanding FBI agents. They wanted him to hurry his report. Yarborough has also stated that the White House reports of Lyndon Johnson were not submitted to the Warren Commission until after Yarborough submitted his on July 10, 1964. The story of pressuring Ralph Yarborough, however, was not LBJ's principal worry during the summer of 1964. Johnson's first political worry, during the 1964 summer, was to make sure the Democratic nomination did not escape him and go to Robert Kennedy. Accordingly, LBJ had taken extra-ordinary measures to make sure that Robert Kennedy, for who he had deep political contempt, did not slip up on his renomination. Originally, Johnson had the investigative structure of the Warren Commission - FBI - Department of Justice take on a public appearance of making certain that Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother of the slain JFK, knew any and all information that the assassination investigation revealed. The public appearance of Robert Kennedy being the first to know about vital assassination facts was, in reality, just so much window dressing…There is little wonder that the FBI people and Lyndon Johnson's White House were concerned about what Ralph Yarborough was going to tell the Warren Commission The FBI and Johnson's White House could control what Robert Kennedy would see or his Department of Justice would say; they cold not, however, control Ralph Yarborough. According to J. Edgar Hoover's own testimony of May 11, 1964, he acknowledged that he submitted vital information to LBJ first and second to Robert Kennedy's Justice Department. Thus, the Justice Dept. received only what LBJ and Hoover wanted…The church committee's report of April 1976, reveals evidence of a so-called 'special squad' of FBI agents. This 'special squad' was exclusively at the individual behest of LBJ and its main concern at the Democratic Convention was to spy on Robert Kennedy (who under Constitutional provisions should have been the person to authorize any such 'special squads'). The Church Committee Report further stated that the 'special squads' information that was gathered on Robert Kennedy went exclusively to Johnson's no. 1 administrative assistant, Walter Jenkins. Jenkins reported individually to LBJ on what Robert Kennedy was up to. During Watergate, these 'special squads' were labeled 'plumbers,' but back in the summer of 1964, they were just 'special squads' to keep Lyndon Johnson informed about Robert Kennedy's activities during the ostentatious Democratic Convention that awarded Lyndon Johnson the nomination on his birthday…first Lyndon Johnson pushed the blame of the Warren Report questions onto Robert Kennedy; second, LBJ talked about evidence being ""brought forth;"" and finally, Johnson had disbanded the Commission in 1964; while in 1966, he talked about it taking further action - a glaring inconsistency which no one bothered to question."
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1/1976 Kenneth A. Gibson is elected the first black president of the US Conference of Mayors.
  
• 7/1/1976 Supreme Court rules that states cannot require a woman to get her husband's consent before having an abortion.
  
• 7/2/1976 Supreme Court rules 7-2 that the death penalty does not violate the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment.
  
• 7/3-4/1976 Israeli paratroopers landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda to rescue 110 Israeli passengers and the French crew of an Air France jet hijacked by Palestinians.
  
• 7/4/1976 massive celebrations as US marks its 200th (Bicentennial) anniversary.
  
• 7/4/1976 Dallas Times Herald story based on an AP report: "A former contract employee of the CIA has told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Jack Ruby met with Cuban premier Fidel Castro in 1963 and discussed the possibility of assassinating President Kennedy...the meeting took place 10 weeks before Kennedy was killed...the CIA man was a former federal undercover narcotics agent...Ruby flew to Havana from Mexico City to try and set up a Cuban connection for importing narcotics to the United States. He met with Castro, and in the course of their conversation, Castro mentioned Kennedy had tried to have him assassinated and he might want to retaliate. Castro asked Ruby if he, with his contacts in the Dallas and Chicago underworlds, would be willing to kill Kennedy or could help arrange the killing. The CIA agent told the committee he did not know what Ruby said in reply. After Kennedy was killed, a Cuban refugee in Miami received a letter from a relative who was close to Castro and who claimed to have attended Castro's conference with Ruby. The refugee turned the letter over to the FBI, but its existence was not mentioned in the Warren Commission report...[The New York Sunday News] quoted a Senate Intelligence Committee source saying the former agent's account might be a red herring' designed to lead investigators away from possible real conspirators."
  
• 7/7/1976 Queen Elizabeth visits the President.
  
• 7/8/1976 Nixon is disbarred from practicing law in New York state.
  
• 7/14/1976 Ford signed a bill authorizing $32.5 billion in fiscal 77 for arms procurement and research.
  
• 7/14/1976 Barbados: CORU bombed the British West Indian Airline Office and the car of the manager of Cubana Airlines.
  
• 7/15/1976 Ford meets with German chancellor Schmidt.
  
• 7/17/1976 West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt ends a three-day visit to Washington.
  
• 7/17/1976 Colombia: CORU machine-gunned the Cuban embassy, bombed the Air Panama office in Bogata and a car owned by a Colombian government official in charge of dealings with Cuba.
  
• 7/22/1976 Congress passes a $3.9 billion jobs bill over Ford's veto. Unemployment in June was 7.5%.
  
• 7/22/1976 CORU failed to kidnap Cuban Consul Daniel Ferrer Fernandez in Merida, Mexico.
  
• 7/24/1976 three members of the anti-Castro group CNM were arrested for trying to bomb the New York Academy of Music, which was holding an event celebrating the Cuban Revolution.
  
• 7/27/1976 Fred Black, Jr. - a major defense lobbyist - telephones Johnny Roselli from Los Angeles with an urgent message, "Get out of Miami."
  
• 7/28/1976 Johnny Roselli is murdered.
  
• 7/31/1976 an 11-day strike by California cannery workers ends with a new contract.
  
• 8/1976 Gallery magazine: "Indonesia 1958: Nixon, the CIA, and the Secret War" by L. Fletcher Prouty
  
• 8/3/1976 Jerry Litton, a Democratic U.S. Representative from Missouri, died with his wife and two children while en route via a small plane to the victory party after winning Missouri's state Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.
  
• 8/3/1976 United Press dispatch says that Chairman Thomas Downing has "distributed a 79-page packet compiled by author Robert Morrow, entitled Motivation Behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, suggesting right-wing Cuban exiles sought Kennedy's assassination in retaliation for his withdrawal of air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion." The material also alleges that then Vice President Richard Nixon was "the CIA action man in the White House" in earlier stages of planning for the Bay of Pigs attack and that Mr. Nixon had promised a right-wing Cuban exile leader he could eliminate left-wing-anti-Castro exiles after the invasion.
  
• 8/6/1976 Labor Department announces that employment rose by more than 400,000 in July to a new record high of 87.9 million, up 3.8 million from March 1975 recession low.
  
• 8/7/1976 Johnny Roselli's body is discovered floating in a 55-gallon oil drum in Dumbfoundling Bay in Miami. He had apparently been stabbed, strangled and dismembered. He had disappeared ten days earlier, just before the Church committee releases its report on the John Kennedy assassination that incorporates Roselli's claim -- which the House Assassinations Committee will later debunk in favor of the Mafia-did-it theory -- that the CIA-Mafia attempts on Castro had boomeranged on JFK. Roselli's murderer or murderers remain unidentified. According to Roselli, who divulged the information just prior to his own murder, LHO was to have been met at the Texas Theater following the JFK assassination by a contact who would then take him to a local airport. There, he would have been flown to either Mexico or Central America where he would "disappear." The actual plan was to take him out of the country and kill him. He would have been identified as the assassin of the president, and a worldwide manhunt would have ensued. It is probable that his body would then have been quickly found, then presented as "shot attempting to escape apprehension." An alternate plan would be to identify the assassin, then discover that he had fled to Cuba. This later plan would serve several purposes, not the least of which would be to implicate Castro in the murder.
  
• 8/9/1976 William and Emily Harris are convicted of kidnapping in the Patty Hearst case.
  
• 8/9/1976 CORU claimed credit for the kidnap-murder in Buenos Aires of two Cuban Embassy officials.
  
• 8/12/1976Washington Post editorial suggested that the Mafia-CIA link should be further explored: "is it really, as the sophisticated wisdom goes, 'paranoid' on our part to brood about the suggestive and possibly monstrous interconnections between all these facts and to wonder why they are not the subject of intense press and government scrutiny. What accounts for the general indifference in high places?"
  
• 8/14/1976 Ford signed a bill raising the price of domestic oil.
  
• 8/18/1976 Panama: CORU bombs the Tocuman International Airport and the offices of Cubana Airlines.
  
• 8/18/1976 Gerald R. Ford is nominated as the Republican candidate for president. As an appointed president, Ford has proved unable to generate the kind of enthusiasm and loyalty within his party that elected presidents traditionally expect.
  
• 8/19/1976 Ford is nominated by the Republicans.
  
• 8/19/1976 National Enquirer reported that Sam Giancana bragged to Judith Campbell that "if it wasn't for me, your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House."
  
• 8/22/1976 Washington Post (and also Jack Anderson 9/7/1976) reported that Roselli said Trafficante had been behind the assassination of JFK, and may have worked with Castro to do it.
  
• 8/22/1976 Two Chilean agents using the names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral arrive in Miami using Chilean passports. They had originally obtained visas from the US Embassy in Paraguay, under false premises; then Ambassador George Landau ordered them to be revoked and lookouts placed in case they tried to enter the US.
  
• 8/25/1976 Jack Anderson column about a foiled assassination plot against Kissinger in Costa Rica, when he visited that country in February. It was foiled by US and local authorities four days before it was to be carried out by Cuban exile Orlando Bosch. He had slipped into the country with a false passport, but the FBI and SS had been alerted. The plans by Bosch's group went back as far as 1972 due to anger over his efforts to improve relations with Castro that year.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 9/1976 Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner for Jim Jones attended by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and other political figures. At that dinner, while introducing Jones, Willie Brown stated "Let me present to you what you should see every day when you look in the mirror in the early morning hours ... Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein ... Chairman Mao."
  
• 9/1/1976 Rep. Wayne Hayes (D-Ohio) quit the House of Representatives when it was discovered that he had an affair with his attractive but unskilled secretary, Elizabeth Ray, who was on his payroll.
  
• 9/4-6/1976 Kissinger meets with South African PM Vorster in Zurich, Switzerland.
  
• 9/5/1976 George de Mohrenschildt, letter to George H. W. Bush - (CIA MFR Raymond M. Reardon SAG 9.20.76.; Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), p. 268. ISBN 978-1--59691-577-2) "Dear George, You will excuse this hand-written letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by the situation. I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter Nadya died from (cystic fibrosis) over three years ago. I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H Oswald and must have angered a lot of people I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more. Good luck in your important job. Thank you so much."
  
• 9/6/1976 Newsweek quoted Billy Graham as saying that he was "opposed to organizing Christians into a political bloc" and would endorse no candidate in the 1976 election. "I learned my lesson the hard way."
  
• 9/6/1976 The US-led United Nations Command and North Korea agree to partition the Joint Security Area in the Demilitarized Zone.
  
• 9/7/1976 Chile: Col. Espinoza ordered Michael Townley to go to the US go carry out the assassination of Orlando Letelier.
  
• 9/7/1976 Jack Anderson reported: "Before he died, Roselli hinted to associates that he knew who had arranged President Kennedy's murder. It was the same conspirators, he suggested, whom he had recruited earlier to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. By Roselli's cryptic account, Castro learned the identity of the underworld contacts in Havana who had been trying to knock him off. He believed, not altogether without basis, that President Kennedy was behind the plot...According to Roselli, Castro enlisted the same underworld elements whom he had caught plotting against him. They supposedly were Cubans from the old Trafficante organization. Working with Cuban intelligence, they allegedly lined up an ex-Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been active in the pro-Castro movement. According to Roselli's version, Oswald may have shot Kennedy or may have acted as a decoy while others ambushed him from closer range. When Oswald was picked up, Roselli suggested the underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them. This almost certainly would have brought a massive U.S. crackdown on the Mafia. So Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald making it appear as an act of reprisal against the President's killer." (Wash. Post)
  
• 9/7/1976 CORU bombed Guyanese Embassy in Trinidad-Tobago.
  
• 9/8/1976 Michael Townley boarded a LAN-Chile Airlines flight for New York.
  
• 9/9/1976 Michael Townley arrived at Kennedy International airport.
  
• 9/9/1976 China: Mao Tse-Tung dies.
  
• 9/10/1976 Townley met with Cuban exiles Guillermo Novo and Jose Dionisio Saurez in Union City, New Jersey. Letelier's citizenship was also revoked by the Chilean regime on this day. That night, at Madison Square Garden, Letelier spoke to five thousand people about the terrors of the Pinochet regime, comparing it to the Nazis.
  
• 9/14/1976 Kissinger arrives in Tanzania to begin talks with African leaders.
  
• 9/14/1976 Speaker of the House Carl Albert tells the press he expects the House of Representatives to vote for new investigations into both the JFK and King murders in the near future. "It's reaching the point where there is so much interest that Congress will probably have to do something about it," Albert lamely remarks.
  
• 9/15/1976 Memo from George Bush to his deputy director of central intelligence: "A recent Jack Anderson story referred to a November 1963 CIA cable, the subject matter of which had some UK journalist observing Jack Ruby visiting [Santos] Trafficante in jail [in Cuba.] Is there such a cable? If so, I would like to see it."
  
• 9/15/1976 Townley, Virgilio Paz, Novo and Suarez met at a house in Union City, NJ, with the parts to make a car bomb.
  
• 9/16/1976 Congress completes work on a tax reform bill; it will reduce the number of individuals who can claim special tax shelters and also raise taxes on the rich. For the first time in 30 years, major changes are made in the estate tax laws.
  
• 9/16/1976 CORU bombed Soviet ship Ivan Shepetkov in Elizabeth, New Jersey, though the act was claimed by Omega 7.
  
• 9/17/1976 Vote in the House of Representatives (280 to 65) created the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the killings of JFK and MLK. The committee was constituted for the four remaining months of the 94th Congress, and it was mandated to report the results of its investigation to the House of Representatives as soon as practicable. Congressman Downing is appointed chairman. Henry Gonzalez of Texas is penciled for the chairmanship when Downing retires at year's end.
  
• 9/17/1976 Banner headlines in the Oakland Tribune today read: NEW PROBE OF JFK, KING KILLINGS SET. This is followed by an Associated Press bulletin: "The House today voted to launch an investigation into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil right leader Martin Luther King." Thomas Downing [the first Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations] says that "Much vital information was withheld from the Warren Commission."
  
• 9/17/1976 The CIA requested that the FBI locate de Mohrenschildt, because he had "attempted to get in touch with the CIA Director." (CIA Message Reference Number 915341.)
  
• 9/1976 George H. W. Bush internal memo on the letter from George de Mohrenschildt (September, 1976) "I do know this man DeMohrenschildt. I first met him in the early 40s. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later he surfaced in Dallas (50's maybe). He got involved in some controversial dealings in Haiti. Then he surfaced when Oswald shot to prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of President Kennedy. I don't recall his role in all this. At one time he had/or spent plenty of money. I have not heard from him for many years until the attached letter came in." George Bush wrote back to de Mohrenschildt (unknown date): "Let me say first that I know it must have been difficult for you to seek my help in the situation outlined in your letter. I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter's tragic death a few years ago, and the current poor state of your wife's health. I was extremely sorry to hear of these circumstances. In your situation I can well imagine how the attentions you described in your letter affect both you and your wife. However, my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years. The flurry of interest that attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long subsided. I can only speculate that you may have become "newsworthy" again in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination, and thus may be attracting the attention of people in the media. I hope this letter had been of some comfort to you, George, although I realize I am unable to answer your question completely. George Bush, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. [CIA Exec Reg. # 76,51571 9.28.76]"
  
• 9/1976 According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), up to 500,000 different non-prescription remedies generate at least $ 3.51 billion in sales every year and, according to its investigating experts who amassed 14,000 volumes of evidence on these over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, the people who purchase them are "the victims of a gigantic medical hoax." According to author/researcher Daniel Zwerdling, the conclusions of intensive independent studies first launched in 1972 by more than 100 leading medical researchers, physicians and pharmacologists recruited by the FDA are that "at least half the drugs are worthless or of dubious value, and some may be harmful. Most of the products are labeled with misleading claims, and many are advertised with bold lies." While the industry invests in massive advertising campaigns, it spends comparatively little in developing and testing new drugs. "Major OTC producers spend at least $ 400 million in network T.U. spots each year ... telling consumers, about fifty times a day, that medically ineffective products will really work." And "the entire OTC industry probably spends less than $ 1 million each year developing new OTC ingredients." The 1962 Food, Drug and Cosmetic law requires the FDA to ban any drug if "there is a lack of substantial evidence that the drug will have the effect the manufacturer claims it does." Yet, the FDA leisurely circumvents the law and continues to allow the drug companies to stall taking their unproven products off the market. The FDA attorneys "protect the product in a sort of limbo, tailor-made for the drug companies"... allowing the "industry to continue advertising and marketing the products for up to five years or longer while its researchers feverishly try to prove that the drugs really work." The story of how the American public is the victim of the "ultimate confidence game" being played by the OTC drug industry and the FDA qualifies it for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: "Non-Prescription Drugs -- The Ultimate Confidence Game" by Daniel Zwerdling; New Times, September 17, 1976, p 36.
  
• 9/18/1976 Townley and Paz bought more parts for the car bomb from a Radio Shack store. That night they began assembling the device at a room in the Regency Congress Inn on New York Avenue in Washington. Around midnight, Townley himself placed the bomb under the driver's seat of Letelier's car.
  
• 9/18-19/1976 Another of the more recent famous UFO sightings occurred on 19th September, 1976 in Teheran, Iran. An Iranian officer at the military control center started receiving reports of a large white light beaming down onto the local streets and houses. At first he thought the calls might be hoaxes/pranks played by the local youth. However, the calls kept on coming and coming so he decided to take a look for himself. When he looked out in the general direction of where the reports were coming from he noticed a huge, brilliant glowing mass, hovering above the city. He immediately called the Shahrokhi Air Base and told them to launch a Phantom Jet fighter to investigate. A Phantom was launched and was piloted by 23 year old Jafari. Jafari started to close down on the bright light he described it as "It's half the size of the moon.... radiating colours...violet, orange and white light." As he got within a mile or so of the object it suddenly shot away a tremendous speed. He tried in vain to try and catch the object but even going at full speed the other craft was still pulling away. He was just about to return to base when he called the Tower and said "Something is coming at me from behind...It is 15 miles away...now 10 miles...now 5...It is level now. I think it's going to crash into me....". After several seconds the tower were relieved to hear Jafari report "It has just passed by...missing me narrowly.". This incident prompted the military sources to launch a second Phantom. Once again the pilot closed within a mile or so of the object when it suddenly moved away, however, this time it appeared to fire a ball of light towards the Phantom. The pilot immediately tried to fire one of his AIM9 heat seeking missiles at the object but as soon as he tried he had a complete electrical failure and nothing would work. The ball of light that had been fired from the strange craft missed the second jet by inches, it then performed a U-turn and 'docked' once again with the main craft. Due to the brightness of the objects both pilots had to circle for an hour before there sight was good enough to land the plane. A secret U.S Secretary of Defence dossier stated that this case was "a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon."
  
• 9/19/1976 Townley dropped off his I-94 immigration form (in the name of his alias Hans Petersen Silva) at the Iberia Airlines counter at Kennedy International to make it look like he had left the country for Spain that day.
  
• 9/20/1976 NATO holds a training exercise to simulate rescue operations against an enemy attack in Norway.
  
• 9/20/1976 The Leteliers dined with colleagues and human rights activists Michael and Ronni Moffitt. Ronnie worked at the Institute for Policy Studies with Letelier.
  
• 9/21/1976 This morning, a Chilean delegation arrived in Washington for a round of talks with State Dept officials and US bankers.
  
• 9/21/1976 US-Soviet SALT II sessions resume in Geneva.
  
• 9/21/1976 This morning, Orlando Letelier (formerly Salvador Allende's ambassador to the United States) and the Moffitts drove to work in Letelier's car. Michael sat in the back as Orlando drove. Ronni sat in the front passenger seat. A car containing some Cubans began following them; they triggered the bomb in their car as they passed the Chilean Embassy. Letelier's legs were blown off, and he quickly bled to death; a piece of shrapnel severed Ronni Moffit's carotid artery, and she drowned in her own blood. Michael Moffitt recovered from lesser injuries. Chilean ambassador Manuel Trucco told the press that Letelier might have been trying to throw a bomb out the window at the Embassy when it went off. Letelier's colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies immediately blamed the Chilean government.
  
• 9/22/1976 Townley flew back to Santiago aboard LAN-Chile airlines.
  
• 9/23/1976 CORU bombed the Palladium Theatre in NY; the act was claimed by Omega 7.
  
• 9/23/1976 Ford and Carter hold the first of three televised debates.
  
• 9/23/1976 Chile: El Mercurio reported that Letelier had been trying to bomb the Chilean embassy when he was killed: "It is clear to any normal person that what has happened can only harm the Chilean government, because it immediately becomes part of the propaganda campaign of the Soviet Union against us."
  
• 9/24/1976 Rhodesian PM Ian Smith accepts a Kissinger proposal for transfer of power to the black majority.
  
• 9/26/1976 Drew Middleton of the NY Times quoted Haig as saying that the US and NATO were falling behind the Communists in military strength.
  
• 9/26/1976 Letelier's funeral; guests included George McGovern, James Abourezk, Eugene McCarthy, Congressmen Tom Harkin, George Miller, Pete Stark and John Brademas, as well as folk singer Joan Baez. Letelier's body would be buried in Venezuela.
  
• 9/27/1976 Washington Post reported that Bailey Smith of the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed Carter, proclaiming that the country needed "a born-again man in the White House…and his initials are the same as our Lord's."
  
• 9/28/1976 FBI, Operation Condor Cable: This cable, written by the FBI's attache in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, summarizes intelligence information provided by a "confidential source abroad" about Operation Condor, a South American joint intelligence operation designed to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in the area." The cable reports that Chile is the center of Operation Condor, and provides information about "special teams" which travel "anywhere in the world... to carry out sanctions up to assassination against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations." Several sections relating to these special teams have been excised. The cable suggests that the assassination of the Chilean Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, may have been carried out as an action of Operation Condor.
  
• 9/28/1976 DIA cable on the Letelier assassination: "It is difficult to pin the blame on Santiago at this point for several reasons. The reach of DINA - cited as responsible - almost certainly (80%) does not extend to the United States. Chilean image-building received a severe setback by the killing..." (Assassination on Embassy Row 231) · report from FBI agent Robert Scherrer on Letelier assassination: "Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorists...provides for joint operations against terrorist targets...Chile is the center for Operation Condor, and in addition it includes Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay...a third and more secret phase...involves the formation of special teams from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions, assassinations...When the location and surveillance operation has terminated, a second team from Operation Condor would be dispatched to carry out the actual sanction against the target." He concluded that the Letelier assassination "may have been carried out as a third phase of Operation Condor." (Assassination on Embassy Row 239)
  
• 9/28/1976 Report from FBI agent Robert Scherrer on Letelier assassination: "Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorists...provides for joint operations against terrorist targets...Chile is the center for Operation Condor, and in addition it includes Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay...a third and more secret phase...involves the formation of special teams from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions, assassinations...When the location and surveillance operation has terminated, a second team from Operation Condor would be dispatched to carry out the actual sanction against the target." He concluded that the Letelier assassination "may have been carried out as a third phase of Operation Condor." (Assassination on Embassy Row 239) Throughout October, US officials will tell the press there is no reason to suspect that the Chilean government was involved in the assassination.
  
• 9/30/1976 Congress overrides Ford's veto of a $56 billion health and education bill.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1976 the Washington Star: In an apparent violation of its charter, the CIA has secretly subsidized the publication and distribution in the United States of dozens of books on communism and other foreign political subjects. Frederick Praeger, former owner of the publishing house that bears his name, said his firm handled between 20 and 25 books subsidized by the CIA before the company's sale in 1966 to Encyclopedia Britanica. In a telephone interview, Praeger said other firms also have published books backed by the agency but he declined to supply any names. "I can assure you some of the most respected names in the publishing industry participated," he said. Praeger said E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA official who was convicted of conspiracy in the Watergate scandal, served in the late 1960s as the agency's 'case officer' dealing with book publishing firms. SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1947, THE CIA HAS BEEN PROHIBITED BY ITS CHARTER FROM ENGAGING IN ACTIVITIES IN THE UNITED STATES. IT IS SPECIFICALLY BARRED FROM SPREADING COVERT PROPAGANDA TO BE READ BY AMERICANS. Praeger said he did not consider any of the CIA-subsidized books he published to be 'propaganda.' Instead, he said, they were "legitimate research" on subjects of interest to the Agency which lacked the broad popular appeal necessary for commercial publication. "The CIA made it possible for authors to travel and we sometimes had contacts with these authors," he said. Praeger said none of the CIA-backed books carried any sort of notice to the reader concerning the financial arrangements. While the CIA's arrangements with Praeger were secret from the public, they were well known to the publisher. However, there are indications that some CIA-subsidized books found their way into print without the publisher's being aware of the author's relations with the agency. David Replogle, who served as president of the Praeger firm after its purchase by Britanica, said he sought and received assurances in 1972 that all contact between the agency and the firm had been cut. But he said some other houses apparently published CIA-backed books without realizing the relationship until the volume was in the shops. Replogle said he believes Doubleday published some CIA-backed books in the mid 1960s without being aware of the full background of the author. He was a member of the Doubleday staff at the time. Victor Marchetti, co-author of "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," said in a telephone interview that the best-seller "The Penkvsky Papers," which purported to be the journal of Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet colonel who spied for the United States, was a fake. "I know the guy who did it," Marchetti said of the author of the book. He indicated the book was based, in part, on information which Penkovsky had supplied to the CIA. But he said spies do not keep diaries because it is simply too dangerous to do so. Marchetti said the CIA distributed the book in an effort to harass Soviet intelligence agents after Penkovsky's activities had already been discovered. "There is nothing in that book that would work up the Soviets," Marchetti said. "But there was a lot of propaganda that would work up the American public." Marchetti said the outline of the book which he wrote with former State Department intelligence officer John D. Marks was leaked to the CIA within hours of its delivery to six publishers in New York. "It had to be one of the six publisher we went to," Marchetti said. "They (the CIA) obviously have very strong contacts in the book publishing world." Marchetti and Marks ultimately did publish their book although it was subjected to 168 deletions by CIA censors who obtained a court-order against its publication in the original version. Chairman Frank Church of the Senate Intelligence has said the panel plans to include in its final report a chapter on CIA relations with book publishers and with journalists. But the Idaho Democrat said the committee's investigation of the subject is not yet complete and he declined to discuss its findings. But Church recently told reporters that the committee considers it "a matter of real concern if planted stories intended to be read abroad were read here and believed here." Although Praeger and Marchetti disagreed sharply on the propriety of CIA-subsidized publishing ventures, they agreed that the agency usually preferred to back tomes on the inner workings of communism. Marchetti related that in 1967, while he was employed by the CIA, he was shown a copy of a book entitled 'The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China' written by a German national named Kurt Muller. Marchetti said since he specialized in Soviet affairs, he asked to borrow the $15 book. "I was told to keep it, they had a whole room full of them," he said. Marchetti said the book "is pure, undiluted CIA propaganda." Most of the books now known to have been backed by the CIA were published before 1967. A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the subject. He was asked specifically if the CIA's book program continued beyond 1967. Hunt, who wrote a long list of spy novels while working as a CIA case officer, was assigned to work with the entire book publishing industry in either 1966 or 1967. Praeger was contemptuous of Hunt's work. "He was a rather good writer," Praeger said of Hunt. "He supposedly had knowledge of the publishing industry." But, Praeger said, Hunt produced "no ideas, no projects, no books, not a single one." Praeger's relations with the CIA began long before Hunt was assigned to the publishing job.
  
• 10/2/1976 in a Justice Dept meeting, Atty Gen. Edward Levi "strongly recommended that neither Mr. Bush nor any other CIA official contact Mr. Helms" about the grand jury investigation. (Robert L. Keuch memo, 10/14/1976)
  
• 10/4-8/1976 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual meeting in Manila.
  
• 10/6/1976 Congress passes a new copyright law to replace that of 1909. It will take effect 1/1/78, and protection now lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years. In the case of films only the producer is recognized as the author.
  
• 10/6/1976 Second presidential debate. Ford makes an incredible gaffe when he says that there is "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration."
  
• 10/6/1976 a Cubana Airlines DC-8, on its way to Havana from Barbados, was blown apart over the Caribbean by Operation Condor agents Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, though Cuban exiles would publicly take the blame. But Ricardo and Lugo slipped up and were captured; they confessed, and named Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carrilles as part of the conspiracy. (Assassination on Embassy Row 245-6) In Miami calls to the media claim credit on behalf of CORU and El Condor, an FNLC satellite. Fidel Castro renounces a 1973 skyjacking treaty with the United States because , he alleges, the CIA is directly involved in the bombing.
  
• 10/6/1976 China: Mao's four closest associates--including his wife, Jiang Qing--are arrested.
  
• 10/7/1976 Fourth Soviet constitution (since 1917) is adopted.
  
• 10/10/1976 HSCA chairman Downing appoints Richard Sprague as chief counsel.
  
• 10/11/1976 Newsweek reported: "...the CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier...because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing US support, could only damage the Santiago regime."
  
• 10/11/1976 Time reported likely CIA involvement in the past with Burmese heroin warlord Gen. Tuan Hsi-wen.
  
• 10/11/1976 US Justice Dept asked Venezuela to turn over Orlando Bosch for questioning in the Letelier case.
  
• 10/12/1976 NY Times reported that "intelligence officials said it appeared that the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency had vitually ruled out the idea that Mr. Letelier was killed by agents of the Chilean military junta..."
  
• 10/13/1976 Bush wrote Helms and McCone telling that they might be called before the grand jury, and he offered them his full support and CIA assistance. (Deadly Secrets xxxi) CIA Director George Bush, disobeying the orders of the Attorney General, notifies former directors Richard Helms and John McCone that the federal grand jury investigating CIA activities in Chile and the Caribbean might call them as witnesses and offers CIA help in preparing their testimony. [Bush saved the necks of seventy current and former CIA agents by his refusal to turn their CIA records over to the Justice Department. This loyalty was rewarded in his campaign for the Republican nomination in 1980 and in the subsequent Reagan-Bush election campaign. Some of their "dirty tricks" included the theft of President Carter's briefing book for the television debate, disinformation about Carter's brother Billy and Libya, and the insertion of spies into Carter's National Security Council.]
  
• 10/15/1976 Houston: Sens. Robert Dole and Walter Mondale engage in the first-ever televised debate between vice-presidential nominees.
  
• 10/15/1976 Kissinger told the press about the killing of Letelier, "We have seen no evidence yet as to who was behind this assassination."
  
• 10/18/1976 Venezuela: El Nacional reported that Guillermo and Ignacio Novo were the authors of the Letelier bombing.
  
• 10/22/1976 Ford and Carter have their last debate.
  
• 10/22/1976 White House Counsel Phillip Buchen wrote Ford that Bush's obstructionism could "abort the pending investigation and lead to no prosecution" and worried that it would "set a precedent for never investigating or prosecuting a confidential source of information, even though he may have committed perjury; also for not prosecuting anyone for any crime if the evidence to do so would involve disclosing confidential CIA sources or methods." Ford was unable to get Bush to cooperate. (Deadly Secrets xxxi-xxxiii)
  
• 10/25/1976 Gov. George Wallace granted a full pardon to Clarence ("Willie") Norris, the last known survivor of the nine Scottsboro Boys who were convicted in 1931 of the alleged rape of two white women on a freight train.
  
• 10/25/1976 Newsweek's cover story ("The Year of the Evangelical") quoted theologian Michael Novak: "There is a hidden power base in American culture which our secular biases prevent many of us from noticing. Jimmy Carter has found it."
  
• 10/27/1976 Ignacio Novo is brought before a grand jury to answer questions about the Letelier assassination.
  
• 10/29/1976 Guillermo Novo is brought before a grand jury to answer questions about the Letelier assassination.
  
• 11/1976 Executives of the Dalkon Corporation and the A. H. Robins Company, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the country, have made millions of dollars from the sale of the Dalkon Shield. The Shield is an intrauterine birth control device which was introduced by A. H. Robins Company in December, 1970. Altogether, it was inserted into 3.3 million women in the United States and overseas. As it turns out, the Shield. was not sufficiently studied and tested, and as a result women have suffered from pelvic inflammatory diseases, massive bleeding, incessant cramps, and other serious infections. Many of the complications have resulted in septic abortions, hysterectomies, and, as of January, 1976, seventeen women had died. By 1975, as complaints started to mount and deaths were reported, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began hearings on the Dalkon Shield. Before the FDA committee made its recommendation, Robins itself suspended sale of the Shield. Nonetheless, in November, 1976, when the Mother Jones article appeared, some 800,000 women in the U.S. and an estimated 500,000 in other countries were still wearing the Dalkon Shield. The failure of the mass media to publicize the Dalkon Shield story qualifies this for consideration as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: MOTHER JONES, November 1976, p36; "A Case of Corporate Malpractice" by Mark Dowie and Tracy Johnston.
  
• 11/1976 issue of Playboy featured an interview with Jimmy Carter. He admitted that though he had remained faithful to his wife, he had "looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times…Christ says, Don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife…" Fellow Christians were dismayed; his own pastor remarked, "I do wish he would have used different words." Jerry Falwell complained, "Like many others, I am quite disillusioned. Four months ago the majority of the people I knew were pro-Carter. Today that has totally reversed." (Washington Post 9/27/1976)
  
• 11/1976 Richard Sprague called David Phillips to testify before the Assassinations Committee in November, 1976. According to Sprague, Phillips said that the CIA had monitored and tape recorded Oswald's conversations with the Soviet Embassy. The tape was then transcribed by a CIA employee who then mistakenly coupled it with a photograph of a person who was not Oswald. Phillips said that the actual recording was routinely destroyed or re-used about a week after it was received.
  
• 11/1/1976 Washington Post reported that the CIA, including director George Bush, did not believe the Chilean regime was responsible for Letelier's death.
  
• 11/2/1976 Presidential election: Carter won by 50.1%, (Ford 48%); Carter had 40 million votes (297 electoral) to Ford's 39 million (241 electoral); Eugene J. McCarthy (Independent) 756,691 votes; Roger MacBride (Libertarian) 173,011; Other 647,631. Carter was the first president elected from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor; most of the support he got in the South came from blacks. Ford actually won two more states than Carter. Democrats controlled 62 or 61 Senate seats and had 290-145 (or 292-143) seat majority in the House. Democrats pick up governors' seats, controlling three times as many governorships as the GOP. Newcomers included Sens. Richard Lugar, Daniel Moynihan, Orrin Hatch. 53% voter turnout. Nixon believed that Ford lost the election when he failed to cultivate the Italian vote in New York, thus losing that state. Media headlines after the results: "The 'Profound Inadequacy' of the GOP" (Washington Post); "Politicians Find GOP Fighting for its Survival" (NY Times); "Southern Republicans: Their Plight is Growing Worse" (Post); "Ailing GOP May Not Recover" (Wall St Journal). In November, 1976, Americans went to the polls to elect, among others, 435 members of the House Of Representatives. There was at least one piece of information that the voters did not have when they cast their ballots. It now appears that a number of these re-elected, estimated by some to be as high as 10 percent of the House, had been beneficiaries of an influence buying program conducted by the Korean CIA. The program's main objective was to gain U.S. military support for Korea through the "distribution" of gifts and dollars to U.S. congressmen and other officials. It is now known that the program of influence-buying started six years earlier, in 1970, after 20,000 American troops were pulled out of Korea. In 1972, Richard Nixon received a campaign contribution of a half million dollars from Reverend Sun Myung Moon and Tongsun Park, a Korean CIA agent, on the orders of South Korean President Park Chung Hee. The U.S. CIA, which had a bug in the Korean Blue House in Seoul since 1973, was aware of the program. Yet, it was only after the November election that any substantial information concerning the influence buying program became available to the American public. Much like Watergate, which only started to make headlines and the network news after the 1972 election, the Korean CIA influence-buying story qualifies for consideration as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976.
  
• In the election year of 1976, Jimmy Carter ran a .successful campaign for the presidency which was based on his image as an anti-establishment, peanut-farming, ex-governor of the state of Georgia. Yet, since the fall of 1973, Carter had been associated with David Rockefeller and other members of an international power elite through his association with the Trilateral Commission, one of Rockefeller's many policy-making organizations. While this side of Carter's background was almost totally ignored by the mass media, the American. public was fully informed about his peanut-farming activities, the Playboy interview, and Amy's lemonade stand. According to the Italian publication Europa, as cited in The Review of The News, Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a founding director of the Trilateral Commission (TLC), had agreed on Carter's potential as our next president as far back as 1970. Supportive of Carter's close relationship with this little-known power elite is the fact that many members of his administration have been drawn from the membership rolls of the TLC. These include: Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State; Brzezinski, National Security Adviser; W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Treasury; Harold Brown, Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State; Richard N. Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs; Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and C. Fred Bergsten, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economic Affairs. Carter's personal choice for vice president, Walter Mondale, is also a member of the TLC. The virtual blackout of information available to the public through the mass media concerning the relationships between Jimmy Carter, David Rockefeller, and the Trilateral Commission qualifies this story for nomination as a "best censored" story.
  
• 11/5/1976 At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an elite group of planners meet with CIA director, George Bush to reassess the official American view of Soviet strategy. The results of this study are finally encapsulated in the 1977 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE-11 3/8). This new view completely contradicts the most fundamental assumption of détente -- that both sides seek only to maintain the status quo.
  
• 11/9/1976 Haig was quoted in the Washington Post deploring the Russians' "dynamic progress" in weaponry, their "global threat to Western lifelines" and their new "imperialistic phase."
  
• 11/9/1976 George De Mohrenschildt committed himself to Parkland Hospital, underwent shock therapy for "psychotic depression," and was released 12/30/1976. On November 9, 1976, Jeanne had him committed to a mental institution in Texas for three months, and listed in a notarized affidavit four previous suicide attempts while he was in the Dallas area. In the affidavit she stated that George suffered from depression, heard voices, saw visions, and believed that the FBI and the Jewish Mafia were persecuting him.
  
• 11/12/1976 Ford extended Al Haig's term in Europe for two more years.
  
• 11/13/1976 Associated Press reports: "The Justice Department reportedly has uncovered a 1964 memo by J. Edgar Hoover in which the late FBI director said he was told Lee Harvey Oswald discussed in advance with Cuban officials his plan to kill President John F. Kennedy ... quoted informed sources as saying that Hoover said in the memo that he was told of the discussions between Oswald and the Cubans by a highly reliable informant who learned about them personally from Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba." "It has previously been disclosed in documents recently released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act that Oswald visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico city less than two months before Kennedy was killed in Dallas November 22, 1963."
  
• 11/15/1976 Washington Post reported that for decades the Justice Dept had been looking the other way when it came to crimes committed by the CIA. This "dates from a 1954 agreement between the two agencies which, in effect, gave the CIA the right to block a prosecution or keep a crime secret in the name of 'national security.'"
  
• 11/17/1976 CIA Director George Bush says he does not believe newspaper reports that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo claiming Lee Harvey Oswald had contacted Cuba prior to JFK's assassination. He says other allegations against his agency have turned out to be false on investigation. Bush admits the CIA has been guilty of abuse of power, but defends the need for an intelligence gathering agency, covert operations and spying in other countries.
  
• 11/18/1976 McCone wrote Bush that he was "greatly troubled" that a CIA official had perjured himself in testimony before Congress. (Deadly Secrets xxxi)
  
• 11/20/1976 Senate Committee on Intelligence releases its Interim Report, describing circumstantial evidence of the Kennedys' approval of the anti-Castro plots.
  
• 11/26-27/1976 Washington Post reported that the WC had learned that the CIA recorded phone conversations made by Oswald while he was in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, but the Agency had destroyed these recordings before the assassination.
  
• 11/26/1976 FBI agent Robert Scherrer reported that Chile's government maintained close ties with Cuban exile groups and sometimes used them for assassinations. (Assassination on Embassy Row 264)
  
• 11/26/1976 the day before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, CIA Chief of Cuban Operations David Phillips dropped a bombshell into the media. The AP reported, in a story headlined "Oswald Offered Soviets Data for Trip," that Phillips remembered another phone call, one not in the record [AP story of 11-27-76, at RIF #104-10400-10010, p.5]. In that call, Phillips recalled, Oswald offered the Soviets information that "might be useful to them." Ronald Kessler of the Washington Post wrote a lengthier story the same day (of which the Russ Holmes Work File contains many copies, an indication of the interest elicited at CIA) entitled "Hill Panel Probing Oswald Call" [Washington Post story of 11-27-76, by Ronald Kessler, at RIF #104-10400-10010, p.9]. Kessler reported that Oswald was trying to wrangle a free trip to the Soviet Union in exchange for information.
  
• 11/26-27/1976 Washington Post reported that the WC had learned that the CIA recorded phone conversations made by Oswald while he was in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, but the Agency had destroyed these recordings before the assassination.
  
• 11/27/1976 Committee members fly to Mexico City, where David Atlee Phillips, among the first witnesses subpoenaed by the Assassinations Committee, is questioned about his role in the CIA supplying the Warren Commission photo of man misidentified as LHO about the tape recordings and the transcripts of Oswald's visit to the Russian embassy. Phillips testifies that surveillance cameras were not working when LHO approached the embassy and that the tape recording had been routinely destroyed. Chief Counsel Sprague asks the CIA for access to its files but the Agency refuses unless Sprague signs a secrecy oath. Sprague says that would be a conflict since the CIA is one of the Committee's targets. The HSCA testimony of David Atlee Phillips is now public, held among the so-called Security Classified testimony in 9 boxes at the National Archives. Phillips was questioned by Richard Sprague, the HSCA's head at that point and for a few months more, until strange circumstances led to his ouster and replacement by Robert Blakey. In his deposition, David Phillips started out answering directly and then slowly started to dance sideways under questioning, trying to maintain his allegation without being pinned down too hard on specifics [The following is taken from the HSCA testimony of David Phillips, 11-2876, pp. 39-40]
  
• 11/27/1976 Release of the film Network, a satire about a fictional television network. Ned Beatty's character explains: "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today . . . We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since men crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."
  
• 11/30/1976 Richard Sprague's team had barely finished interviewing David Phillips when they flew down to Guadalajaro Mexico to interview the Tarasoff couple (CIA transcribers), on November 30, 1976. And in this interview, Boris Tarasoff didn't have the memory lapse he was to exhibit later, during the Blakey era. The summary of this earlier interview, included along with the transcript in the file, contains the following: The Tarasoffs claim to remember translating and transcribing at least two conversations involving Oswald. They remember that the first one was fairly short and routine. Oswald did not identify himself in this first conversation. The second one was much longer and Oswald did identify himself in this conversation. The Tarasoffs remember Oswald discussing his financial situation in this call. They deny making any editorial or marginal comments in the transcription of this call. The Tarasoffs remember nothing unusual about the first call or the circumstances surrounding its delivery or transcription. The second call was delivered to them and they were asked to transcribe the Oswald call as quickly as possible. Their contact expressed a strong interest in the identity of the caller and the substance of the call. The Tarasoffs translated and transcribed the call and returned the transcript on the same day, using an emergency contact as opposed to waiting until the next morning and using their standard contact [HSCA Tarasoff testimony, 11-30-76, summary material]. In this interview, both Tarasoffs clearly remembered an English conversation, which Anna transcribed as she typically handled English calls whereas her husband typically did the Russian ones. This may be responsible for her memory being better regarding the content of the call. But that there was such a call, in English, lengthy, and with a great deal of excitement surrounding it, both Tarasoffs were explicit.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 12/1976 US inflation rate was 5.8%. Federal spending was $371 billion with a $73 billion deficit. National debt was $620 billion (interest paid: $37 billion).
  
• 12/1976: HSCA Chairman Thomas Downing retires. Richard A. Sprague tells Congress he needs $13 million for a real investigation.
  
• 12/1976 Chile: Pinochet told an interviewer that he was committed to "authoritarian democracy" and that representative democracy was an "outdated system."
  
• 12/2/1976 George Lardner Jr. reported that it was Mark Lane who recruited Arlen Specter's Philadelphia D.A. office partner, Richard A. Sprague, to become the chief counsel for the HSCA. (Washington Post)
  
• 12/3/1976 Carter announces Cyrus Vance as his choice for Secretary of State.
  
• 12/5/1976 Washington Star reported that two months before Nixon resigned, Haig had ordered the Army's Criminal Investigation Command to conduct a secret investigation into Nixon's possible ties to the mob, specifically Southeast Asian narcotics traffickers. This information was confirmed for the Star by Army officials involved. The Star's Jeremiah O'Leary reported that the investigation was ordered by Haig during a meeting with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command Chief, Col. Henry H. Tufts, at Ford McNair. The chief investigator was CIC special agent Russell L. Bintliff, a former special operations officer for the Army and CIA. Bintliff told the Star: "...Haig wanted some things checked out on the President. It involved Caulfield and Ulasewicz. Haig wanted to know whether Caulfield and Ulasewicz had been to the Far East and carried back any money for Nixon. He also wanted to know whether Nixon had ever been mixed up with organized crime...I never could find that Caulfield and Ulasewicz had gone to the Far East, but in my verbal reports to Col. Tufts I pointed out that in those days an American didn't need a passport to get into Vietnam...I concluded that they probably had gone to Vietnam, and I considered there were strong indications of a history of Nixon connections with money from organized crime."
  
• 12/6/1976 Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) is chosen Speaker of the House.
  
• 12/6-10/1976 NATO holds year-end meetings in Brussels.
  
• 12/8/1976 In 1976 Thomas N. Downing began campaigning for a new investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Downing said he was certain that Kennedy had been killed as a result of a conspiracy. He believed that the recent deaths of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were highly significant. He also argued that the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had withheld important information from the Warren Commission. Downing was not alone in taking this view. In 1976, a Detroit News poll indicated that 87% of the American population did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed Kennedy. Coretta Scott King, was also calling for her husband's murder to be looked at by a Senate Committee. It was suggested that there was more chance of success if these two investigations could be combined. Henry Gonzalez and Walter E. Fauntroy joined Downing in his campaign and in 1976 Congress voted to create a 12-member committee to investigate the deaths of Kennedy and King. Thomas N. Downing named Sprague as chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Gaeton Fonzi was to later say: "Sprague was known as tough, tenacious and independent. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind when I heard of Sprague's appointment that the Kennedy assassination would finally get what it needed: a no-holds-barred, honest investigation. Which just goes to show how ignorant of the ways of Washington both Sprague and I were". Sprague quickly assembled a staff of 170 lawyers, investigators and researchers. On 8th December, 1976, Sprague submitted a 1977 budget of $6.5 million. Frank Thompson, Chairman of the House Administration Committee made it clear he opposed the idea of so much money being spent on the investigation. Smear stories against Sprague began appearing in the press. David B. Burnham of The New York Times reported that Sprague had mishandled a homicide case involving the son of a friend. Members of Congress joined in the attacks and Robert E. Bauman of Maryland claimed that Sprague had a "checkered career" and was not to be trusted. Richard Kelly of Florida called the House Select Committee on Assassinations a "multimillion-dollar fishing expedition for the benefit of a bunch of publicity seekers." Probably the most important criticism came from Eldon J. Rudd of Arizona, a former FBI agent who had worked on the assassination investigation, declared the Committee had "already fanned the flames of rumor, distortion and unwanted distrust of law enforcement agencies." However, Walter E. Fauntroy defended the work of Sprague: "threshold inquiries by a thoroughly professional staff... in the last three months have produced literally a thousand questions unanswered by the investigations of record."
  
• 12/10/1976 Science magazine predicted the possibility of heading "toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" in the near future.
  
• 12/10/1976 David Burnham - "Assassination Study Requests $13 million" - New York Times
  
• 12/11/1976 The episode of All in the Family tonight featured Archie Bunker predicting that Reagan would win the 1980 presidential election.
  
• 12/17/1976 Judith Campbell Exner holds San Diego press conference, denying any role in CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro.
  
• 12/18/1976 "The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 12/18/76 (Liz Smith): Now that we're going to ante up $13 million tax paid dollars for Congress to reinvestigate the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, it bears thinking on that our own CIA and FBI were neither up to nor trustworthy enough, to do the job for us as they should have. This brings to mind the strange case of Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen's biographer, Lee Israel, and the son of the columnist, Kerry Kollmar, have spent almost a year trying to wrest from these two government agencies the pertinent papers concerning Kilgallen's involvement with the assassination of JFK. They embarked on their efforts separately - Lee, because she is writing Dorothy's life story; Kerry because he is fighting mad, livid with frustration and wants to find out what his famous mother knew and how she really died. Kerry wants the material he is entitled to under the Freedom of Information Act. Proud of what he has learned of his mother, he wants the story of her prescience and courage in the matter of JFK's death made public. He wants it in Lee Israel's book for the records. Yet even the intervention of Bella Abzug before she became a lame duck, led nowhere. The FBI has voluminous Kilgallen material. In 1964, several weeks before the Warren Commission Report was released, Dorothy published prematurely Jack Ruby's testimony to the Commission. The FBI then began investigating the columnist. She refused to reveal sources and advised the FBI to stop wasting time on her and ""go after the facts."" The FBI still tapped Kilgallen's phones and placed her under surveillance. The columnist began making calls from booths using code names. (She always called herself Parker when talking to investigator Mark Lane, and called him ""Robinson."") So much for the FBI and its Mickey Mouse behavior. But what about the CIA? The CIA, for instance, has 20 odd pages on Dorothy Kilgallen in its files. It contacted 51 CIA offices in her ""case""! Yet requests to both the FBI and CIA by Kerry Kollmar continue to run up against a bureaucratic jargon and delay that resemble ""stonewalling."" With both the FBI and CIA under shadows of suspicion and clouds of disgrace, one would think it would behoove them to act quickly and openly to make the Kilgallen dossiers available to her outraged son and her intrepid, stubborn biographer. Bu the cover-up goes on!"
  
• 12/20/1976 Chicago mayor Richard Daley dies in office of a heart attack at age 74.
  
• 12/20/1976 Jack Anderson reported that Letelier had been receiving money from Castro each month; this was based on papers found in Letelier's briefcase by D.C. Homicide.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

1977 William Jennings Bryan III, master hypnotherapist with CIA connections, is found dead in his hotel room in a Las Vegas hotel. The coroner states he died "of natural causes", even before the autopsy is performed. Bryan was "the world's leading expert" on hypnosis. Two call girls who have "serviced" him regularly for the final two years of his life say that Bryan not only boasted to them about hypnotizing Sirhan Sirhan (RFK's alleged assassin), but also about working for the CIA on "top secret projects." Bryan once helped solve the Boston Strangler case by hypnotizing the suspect, Albert DiSalvo. Sirhan's notebooks contain -- among other ostensibly senseless jottings -- the name "DiSalvo" written over and over again. Confronted with this "diary entry" Sirhan is baffled and says the name is meaningless to him.

On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said: The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

1977 Timothy Leary publishes "Exo-Psychology", in which he confides "there are two aspects of this social conditioning regime which are not stressed by Skinner. To make it work, the government psychologists must have total control over the citizenry, and there must be total secrecy and censorship. One dissident, freedom-oriented psychologist can totally disrupt a psychological fascism by public exposure. Psychological control techniques cannot be employed in a democracy where minority groups can campaign against and publically discuss the techniques being used. Thus, the proposals of B.F. Skinner cannot be implemented except in a state where the government has total control of communication."

1977 The US Army admits that it had carried out hundreds of biological warfare tests in the United States over a period of decades since World War II, including 25 major operations targeting the American public employing known disease-causing agents. Crop disease substances were used 31 times.

The Trilateral Commission (TLC), though last year's number one choice for the "Ten Best Censored Stories of 1976," has been renominated, as this monumentous story still has had very limited press coverage. The idea for the Commission came from David Rockefeller, of Chase Manhattan Bank, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the late 60's, with his fears that the "excess of democracy" was curbing both the power and flexibility of the U.S. government's world interventions which would minimize chances for situations favorable to U.S. capital and the multinational corporations. The purpose of the group is to bring together multinational business executives, politicians, and a few union leaders, from Western Europe, the United States, and Japan -- the world's industrial giants -- into a policymaking alliance designed to dictate world policies and exploit citizens for economic gains. The first step in the plan was to gain control of the legislative branch of the U.S. government by selecting, in 1973, an ambitious and capable presidential candidate, an unknown peanut farmer from Georgia, with no political base, to be a founding member of the Trilateral Commission and then providing his education in international politics. Jimmy Carter was elected with the help of the 200 odd Commissioners, including the heads of CBS and Time. This was followed by the new President's appointment of TLC members to all the policy making roles in the U.S. government. A few examples of Trilateral Commission members, other than Carter himself, are, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to the President; Walter Mondale, Vice President; Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State; Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense; and W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of the Treasury. Every one of Carter's major moves so far has been in precise accord with the group's recommendations. Their general 'band aid' plan includes (1) a new economic planning agency attached to the White House; (2) some unspecified way of eliminating the pervasive suspicion of the motives and powers of political leaders; (3) reinvigoration of political parties accomplished mainly by making it legal for corporations to support them; (4) check upon the abuses of power by the press to include tougher libel laws against journalists who insult decision makers; (5) reduced spending for education as it leads to frustration, criticism, and disrespect; (6) government subsidies to major corporations to design unspecified new modes of organization that will head off irresponsible blackmailing techniques; (7) a new institute for strengthening of democratic institutions at the public's expense. The potential effects of this organization on, not only our society, but the rest of the world qualify this story to be nominated as a "best censored story." "The Making of a President," by Robert Manning, Penthouse, September, 1977, p. 118+. "Cartergate: The Death of Democracy," by Craig S. Karpel, Penthouse November, 1977, p. 69+. "Where Jimmy Went Wrong," by Taylor Branch, Esquire, May, 1977, p. 28-21.

Execution, starvation, cannibalism, torturing, disease, malnutrition are only a few violations of human rights being made by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and parts of Vietnam. A few journalists who have conducted interviews with refugees believe that out of a population of seven million, 1.2 million have died in the last two years alone. In addition, a Catholic missionary, Andre Gelinas, told of "15,000 to 20,000 suicides." Reports also indicate that the Khmer Rouge are treating the people like slaves and imposing exacting rules. Failure to observe these rules leads to immediate execution. Anyone who dares to complain is punished. Rule breaking and complaining apply to such "crimes" as asking for more food, falling in exhaustion, and not meeting Khmer Rouge's inhuman values. These so-called "transgressors" are usually clubbed to death with objects such as pick handles. And when a starving worker is caught cannibalizing, he is tortured to death. Such tortures included being buried in the ground up to the shoulders and being beaten to death -- or impaling their heads onto pointed stakes. In January, conferences on the subject were held, to which all three major networks were invited by the American Security Council; not one sent a correspondent. Coverage that does exist is sparse and difficult to find. This may be the most important human rights story of the decade. It is a stark cruel story of mass slaughter which has been ignored by the mass media, and therefore qualifies for a nomination as one of the "ten best censored stories of 1977." SOURCES: National Review, "The Nation as a Concentration Camp," September 2, 1977, p: 988. Newsweek, "A New Indochina War," January 16, 1978, p. 47, by Kenneth Labich, with Holger Jansen in Bangkok, Lars-Erik Nelson in Washington, and bureau reports. The Progressive, "Vietnam: A New Numbers Game," by Robert K. Musih, September, 1977, p. 32. National Review, "The New Vietnam," April 29, 1977, p. 487. T.V. Guide, "Why Do Networks Play Down News From Cambodia?," by Patrick Buchanan, March 18-24, 1978.

Acid rain, caused predominantly by oil and coal burning, smelting, and car exhaust, has been falling throughout most parts of the east coast of the U.S. The acidity of the rain contaminates the soils, damages crops, stunts the growth of trees by possibly more than 10 percent, lowers the pH of even the most remote high altitude lakes, thus wiping out entire native fish species and causes other potentially disastrous occurrences. Today in over 50 percent of all the Adirondack lakes, about 2,000 feet in elevation -- the ones most remote from civilization -- all the fish have died. Lakes that have been famous for trout for the last century now cannot even support minnows. Biologists at Cornell University have found that rain and snow throughout the eastern U.S. presently falls with 100 times more acidity than it did a generation ago. Further studies indicate that in most areas the soil quickly neutralizes the acid. But in thin, sandy soils, such as those found in high mountainous areas, the acid precipitation runs off, unchanged, into the lakes. The "unbuffered" rain of the 1970's is acidic enough to kill off most freshwater fish east of the Mississippi. In the Adirondacks, most of the water is too acidic to allow fish to reproduce. The problem is wide-ranging because of the nature of rain. The pollution that causes the acidity (sulfuric and nitric acid) can originate thousands of miles from where the rain finally falls. The closest thing to point source-crackdown would have to occur at the electrical generating plants and industrial sites of Detroit, Chicago, and southern Ontario. Yet the opposition to air cleanup by these plants has been fierce. Norway and Sweden are already experiencing a full-blown ecological crisis due to acid rain, polluted by industrialized Europe. Salmon fisheries in thousands of lakes and streams have been wiped out and millions of salmon have been killed. The world-wide and intensive damaging effects of acid rain, and this issue's scanty coverage, nominate this story for one of the "Best Censored Stories of 1977." SOURCES: "Look What They've Done to the Rain," by Alan MacRobert, Mother Jones magazine, December, 1977, pp. 65-67. "News Briefs," Not Man Apart, Mid-September, 1977, p. 9.

"Studies have linked sustained microwave exposure to headaches, dizziness, fatigue, irritability, loss of judgment, leukemia, cataracts, changes in the blood-brain barrier, heart trouble, and central nervous disorders." Yet a cover-up exists. The food industry uses microwaves to roast peanuts and coffee beans; freeway call-boxes use microwaves; burglar alarms and automatic garage door openers use microwaves; TV transmitters, CB radios, police radios, cab radios, telephone relay systems, and at our airports, radar, all consume microwave in some form. And these are only civilian related uses of microwaves and not military. People who are exposed to potentially harmful effects of microwave radiation have no way of knowing it. Microwave radiation, studies show, has a cumulative effect upon humans, much like x-rays. So what may appear to be safe today may result in some harmful effect 20 years later. The biggest user of microwaves is the U.S. military. It is the focal point on our nuclear weapons guidance systems. Radar tracking devices are dependent upon microwaves. Communication and spy satellites are also linked with microwave usage. The same people who make microwave ovens, G.E. and Litton, also are in the radar device making business. If low-level exposure to microwave radiation were ever to be proven dangerous, the cost to modify its usage would be staggering. Publicity regarding military usage of microwave has been stifled in the past. Research projects conducted by the military and showing adverse effects of low-level exposure to microwave radiation has been covered up. The U.S. government allows microwave oven leakage to be five milliwatts and considers ten milliwatts a safe level for human exposure. The Soviet Union, which did the most complete study on microwave dangers to humans, believes that the safety factor for microwave exposure should be 1000 times less than what the U.S. allows. There has been no U.S. research to date on the long-range effects of microwave radiation on humans. The military wants no part in any conclusive research on this matter. As a result, this story, due to its lack of public airing, is nominated as one of the "best censored stories of 1977." Zapping of America, by Paul Brodeur, W. W. Norton Publishing, 1977. "Microwaves," by Paul Brodeur, The New Yorker, December 13, 1976, pp. 50-75, 88-106, December 13 "The Air Pollution you Can't See," by Scott Kaufer, New Times, March 6, 1978, pp. 30-36, 60-64.

• 1/2/1977 New York Times expose by David Burnham dug up some controversial items about Richard Sprague's tenure as assistant district attorney. Gaeton Fonzi later called it "an incredibly crude journalistic hatchet job, reviewing Sprague's seventeen-year career as a Philadelphia prosecutor strictly in terms of the controversies he had provoked." The hit piece almost blew up the HSCA.
  
• 1/3/1977 HSCA officially expired as the 94th Congress ended its term.
  
• 1/4/1977 A resolution reconstituting the Assassinations Committee by a unanimous-consent voice vote fails. It will take weeks of maneuvering before the Committee will officially be reconstituted. A unanimous consent request was introduced to consider House Resolution 9, a resolution to reconstitute the HSCA. An objection was heard, however, and House Resolution 9 was not brought to an immediate vote on the floor of the House. It was instead referred to the Rules Committee, which began hearings on it on January 25, 1977. House Resolution 9, as amended, was favorably reported by the Rules Committee as House Resolution 222 on February 1, 1977.
  
• 1/4/1977 Journalist Willem Oltmans interviewed by Robert Tanenbaum (4th January 1977) about George De Mohrenschildt:
  

Robert Tanenbaum: What was the reason he told you about going to commit suicide?
William Oltmans: One of the reasons was, I found it in my notes, that he doesn't want his children to look upon, to their father for the rest of their life as having been involved, directly involved in the killing of President Kennedy. He would say - and I have notes - "I would rather kill myself than let my children" - and he called not only his daughter Alexandra, but also his brother, Professor de Mohrenschildt, who is in California. He said, "My brother and daughter, I don't want to have to live the rest of their lives by this thing." You know, that he was involved. "I would rather shoot myself." He told me that various times."
Robert Tanenbaum: All right, sir. So, up until the time that you left New York City from John F. Kennedy Airport, did you have any other conversations with him with regard to the assassination of the President?
William Oltmans: Yes, repeatedly.
Robert Tanenbaum: Now, again in substance, tell us what, if anything George de Mohrenschildt told you - this is up until the time you were in New York City - about the assassination.
William Oltmans: Sir, pages and pages. I will...
Robert Tanenbaum: In substance, will you tell us what he said, please.
William Oltmans: Each time he would reveal something else....
Robert Tanenbaum: Did you have any conversations of substance with him in New York?
William Oltmans: Not at all. New York, talked a bit, but not in London.
Robert Tanenbaum: Up until this time, had he ever mentioned Jack Ruby or H. L. Hunt?
William Oltmans: Yes.
Robert Tanenbaum: Up until this time?
William Oltmans: Yes, I forgot all about that.
Robert Tanenbaum: Would you please tell us that, then.
William Oltmans: O.K. You see, in Dallas, in the many talks I had with him about going, I asked him point blank, "Did you know Ruby?"
"Yes."
"Have you been in Ruby's Bar?"
"Yes."
"Then what happened to Oswald. If Oswald set up the Kennedy Assassination, he must have had a lot of money."
De Mohrenschildt, with a devilish laugh said "He wasn't long enough around to get the money."
Then I said, "But who would pay?"
You see, he talked in circles. He was still talking in circles. He was coming around to talking, but when I asked him, who would put up that kind of money, he said, well, he would reply, "Well, did you see the letter of Oswald, was released by the FBI, to Hunt? Now, why do you think Oswald would write to Mr. H. L. Hunt?"
Then I said "Do you know Hunt, have you known him?"
He said, "I knew him for 20 years. I was very close with him. I went to all his parties."
You see, de Mohrenschildt clearly indicated that the money had come from, that his contacts were "upwards to Hunt, and downwards to Oswald."

• 1/6/1977 David Burnham - "Assassination Panel is Warned on Its Techniques" - New York Times
  
• 1/7/1977 William Douglas Pawley, millionaire ex-ambassador, is also found dead today in his Miami Beach home of a gunshot wound to the chest. His death is ruled a suicide. When Allen Dulles began nudging Eisenhower to begin conducting anti-Castro activities inside of Cuba, he was assisted by Pawley -- who had links to the exile-Cuban community, Time-Life, the CIA, and the Mafia.
  
• 1/7/1977 Juan Peruyero, the outspoken past president of Brigade 2506, is walking out of his house to go to work when two gunmen riding in a gold Cadillac shoot him to death. Although the crime is not solved, it appears that Peruyero is the victim of a rift in Brigade 2506 over continued membership in CORU after the Cubana airline bombing. The shooting ends a three-year bombing and murder binge that includes more than 100 attacks, with 80 percent of the cases unsolved.
  
• 1/10/1977 Al Haig was quoted in the NY Times making dire warnings of the Soviet threat.
  
• 1/12/1977 Ford gives his last State of the Union address.
  
• 1/12/1977 David Burnham - "New Assassination Panel is Blocked." New York Times
  
• 1/12/1977 Tom Robinson was the mortician who prepared John Kennedy's remains for burial. Robinson prepared for an open casket funeral, so the preparation of the skull was especially meticulous. Robertson described the skull wound in a suppressed 1/12/77 HSCA interview with Andy Purdy and Jim Conzelman, not made public until the 1990s: Purdy asked Robinson: "Approximately where was (the skull) wound located?" Robinson: "Directly behind the back of his head." Purdy: "Approximately between the ears or higher up?" Robinson, "No, I would say pretty much between them."
  
• 1/15/1977 a US Senator demands that CIA director Bush provide information about bacteriological sabotage against Cuba.
  
• 1/17/1977 first execution in the US since reinstatement of the death penalty; Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah.
  
• 1/20/1977 Carter sworn in, calling for "a new national spirit of unity and trust." He also promised "a world order that is more responsive to human aspirations."
  
• 1/21/1977 Carter signed executive order giving complete and unconditional amnest for all draft evaders. He also urged Americans to set their home thermostats to 65 degrees as the maximum winter heat to ease the energy crisis.
  
• 1/25/1977 Burnham, David - "Assassination Panel Facing Budget Trim" - New York Times
  
• 1/27/1977 Carter sends Congress a $31 billion proposal to stimulate the economy.
  
• 2/1977 Jeanne left George de Mohrenschildt and went to California.
  
• 2/2/1977 Henry Gonzalez becomes HSCA chairman. House Resolution 222 was passed by the House to reconstitute the committee. On 2nd February, 1978, Henry Gonzalez replaced Thomas N. Downing as chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Gonzalez immediately sacked Sprague as chief counsel. Sprague claimed that only the fill committee had the power to dismiss him. Walter E. Fauntroy agreed with Sprague and launched a campaign to keep him as chief counsel.
  
• 2/2/1977 Washington Post reported that a probe by the Justice Dept that reviewed the FBI's handling of the MLK assassination agreed with the Bureau in stating that Ray had acted alone.
  
• 2/3/1977 David Burnham - "House Gives Assassination Panel Authority to Continue Temporarily" - New York Times
  
• 2/3/1977 Brigadier General Teferi Bante, Ethiopian head of state, and six others on the military council in power, were murdered during a coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam.
  
• 2/6/1977 Dallas Morning News Earl Golz story: "Six minutes of the file tape recording of a Dallas police motorcycle radio, marred by electronic interference but transmitting when the shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy, apparently hold the key to a new challenge of Warren Commission findings, sources said Thursday. The tape, which never was tested acoustically by the Warren Commission, reportedly indicates in recent tests that four shots - not three - were fired... Among the many questions stemming from the tape and its most recent analysis is the identity of the motorcycle policeman who apparently held open his radio microphone from 12:28 to 12:34 p. m. on Nov. 22, 1963...on Thursday, The News learned a House Assassinations Committee investigator made an appointment in Dallas to obtain a fourth and even more complete transcript from private citizens who have made a study of the assassination. Their version, painstakingly written word for word, states that at 12:34 p. m., as the electronic interference is about to end, a dispatcher's voice is heard to say, "There is a motorcycle officer up on Stemmons with his mikestuck open on Channel 1. Could you send someone up there and tell him to shut it off?" Just prior to this request on Channel 2, the then-police chief, Jesse Curry, is quoted as shouting instructions on the same channel. The interference on Channel 1 stopped almost immediately, according to those who have studied the tape recordings, but the identity of the motorcycle officer was never learned. Also, the citizens with the most complete version of the tapes claim they can hear "electronic beeps" during the six minutes, which they say sound like the Morse code signal for "victory." To the ear, the six minutes on the police radio tape sound like a constant electronic roar. The sound of shots are not discernible... In connection with the House Assassinations Committee investigation, Dallas Police Chief Donald Byrd has agreed to seal off Dealey Plaza for three hours beginning at 5:30 a. m. Aug. 20 - not Aug. 22 as incorrectly reported Thursday - so representatives of the committee can fire weapons to simulate the possible velocity and vibrations of shots as determined by the Cambridge firm."
  
• 2/6/1977 Dallas Morning News article by Earl Golz: "A letter purportedly written by Lee Harvey Oswald asking a "Mr. Hunt" for "information concerning my position" two weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is being checked for its authenticity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agents said they had no knowledge of the letter until several days ago when they acquired a copy that had been delivered to a former aide of the late H.L. Hunt, Dallas billionaire oilman...An unidentified source of the letter asserted he "gave" FBI Director Clarence Kelley a copy in late 1974, but FBI agents told The News this week they have no record of such a delivery. Two of the federal agents questioned this reporter extensively after learning that a copy of the letter had passed through his hands before reaching the former Hunt aide. The contention that Kelley was given a copy was made in an unsigned cover letter typewritten in Spanish and mailed in August, 1975, from Mexico City to Penn Jones Jr. of Midlothian, Texas....Jones said he replied in writing to the return address on the envelope, which was "P.S., Insurgentes Sur No. 309, Mexico, DF, Mexico." "All I did was answer the letter and got no reply," Jones said. "I never did hear from him again. Of course, it did not come back to me so apparently it was delivered to somebody.".... Later FBI official Tom Harrington in Washington, D.C., called to say "no comment" when asked whether his agency had reactivated an ongoing investigation of the Kennedy slaying."
  
• 2/6/1977 Pittsburgh Press article about former DPD chief Jesse Curry. He suspects that people were involved with Oswald in the assassination, thinks Castro might have been behind it all in retaliation for plots against him. Says that Dallas FBI's Shanklin was going to be fired by Hoover if Curry didn't retract his statements to the press about the FBI knowing Oswald.
  
• 2/9/1977 The political thriller, Twilight's Last Gleaming, is released. Directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark. Loosely based on a 1971 novel, Viper Three by Walter Wager, it tells the story of Lawrence Dell, a renegade USAF general, who escapes from a military prison and takes over an ICBM silo near Montana, threatening to launch the missiles and start World War III unless the President reveals the real reason why America fought in the Vietnam War.
  
• 2/10/1977 Henry Gonzalez moves to fire Richard Sprague on grounds the former prosecutor has "engaged in a course of conduct that is wholly intolerable for any employee of the House." Specifically, Gonzalez complained that Sprague is "making a consistent attempt to undermine my chairmanship and malign me personally with the members of the committee staff."
  
• 2/10/1977 David Burnham - "Sprague Ouster Is Upset by Panel on Assassination" - New York Times
  
• 2/12/1977 David Burnham - "Assassination Panel's Fate In Doubt as Sprague Faces New Allegations" - New York Times
  
• 2/13/1977 Willem Oltmans told the HSCA: "He begged me to take him out of the country because they are after me." On 13th February 1977, Oltmans took de Mohrenschildt to his home in Amsterdam where they worked on his memoirs. Over the next few weeks de Mohrenschildt claimed he knew Jack Ruby and argued that Texas oilmen joined with intelligence operatives to arrange the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to Willem Oltmans, he confessed to being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "I am responsible. I feel responsible for the behaviour of Lee Harvey Oswald... because I guided him. I instructed him to set it up." Oltmans claimed that de Mohrenschildt had admitted serving as a middleman between Lee Harvey Oswald and H. L. Hunt in an assassination plot involving other Texas oilmen, anti-Castro Cubans, and elements of the FBI and CIA. Willem Oltmans arranged for George de Mohrenschildt to meet a Dutch publisher and the head of Dutch national television. The two men then travelled to Brussels. When they arrived, Oltmans mentioned that an old friend of his, a Soviet diplomat, would be joining them a bit later for lunch. De Mohrenschildt said he wanted to take a short walk before lunch. Instead, he fled to a friend's house and after a few days he flew back to the United States. He later accused Oltmans of betraying him. Russ Baker suggests in his book Family of Secrets: "Perhaps, and this would be strictly conjecture, de Mohrenschildt saw what it meant that he, like Oswald, was being placed in the company of Soviets. He was being made out to be a Soviet agent himself. And once that happened, his ultimate fate was clear."
  
• 2/16/1977 Janani Luwum, the Anglican archbishop of Uganda, and two other men were killed in what Ugandan authorities said was an automobile accident.
  
• 2/19/1977 Allard K. Lowenstein wrote in Saturday Review: "James R. Hoffa did not vanish after a rendezvous with a James Earl Ray acting alone,' loose nuts did not do in the Yablonskis, new editions of Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan did not murder Sam Giancana in the basement of his home while he was under twenty-four hour guard by the FBI. It is time to accept the fact tha the question is not whether groups with such power exist, but how these groups use their power, who their allies are in and out of government and what if anything can be done to protect the democratic process against forces and alliances that operate out of sight and often beyond the limits set by the law." (Saturday Review)
  
• 2/22/1977 In a front-page article in The New York Times, Nicholas Gage writes: " ... two men known to have personal knowledge of the circumstances of the murder provided solid information that Mr. [Johnny] Roselli was killed by members of the underworld as a direct result of his testimony before the Senate Committee."
  
• 2/24/1977 Carter announces that countries' foreign aid will depend on their human rights records.
  
• 2/25/1977 Jack Anderson reported in the New York Times that the first anti-Castro plot was begun when the CIA "spoke secretly to Howard Hughes' chief honcho in Las Vegas, Robert Maheu, about the project. Maheu recruited [Johnny] Roselli...Roselli looked upon the assassination mission as an opportunity to gain favor with the US government."
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 3/1977 More than 53 million persons (over 25 percent of the U.S. population) will develop some form of cancer in their lifetimes, and approximately 20 percent will die from it. The rate of increases in cancer deaths is more rapid than the rate of increases in population. Chemical carcinogens that have been shown to be health hazards to the workers employed by industry have been publicized by the media. However, each of these incidents has been treated as an isolated accident instead of as a part of a long-term chronic threat to the nation's health. The consensus in the scientific community is that most human cancers are environmental in origin and therefore preventable. Also, that the U.S. population has been -- and is being -- continuously exposed to countless known and unknown chemical carcinogens in their air, water, and food. The 100 billion dollar a year U.S. chemical industry produces 1,000 new chemical compounds a year. This is in addition to the 34,000 chemical substances and 2 million chemical mixtures already on the market. Very few of these mixtures, and almost none of the chemicals, have been tested -- the potential toxicity risks could be substantial. Potent new chemical agents are being synthesized and introduced into commerce and the workplace, generally without prior adequate testing for carcinogenicity or for other adverse public health and ecological effects. The failure of the media to see the chemical carcinogen problem as a serious health threat to the entire U.S. population instead of as isolated incidents, qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1977. SOURCES: The Progressive, February,1977, p. 15, "Chemical Catastrophes," by Daniel Zwerdling. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March, 1977, p. 22, "Cancer and the Environment," by Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
  
• 3/1/1977 President Jimmy Carter appoints a Naval Academy classmate, Admiral Stansfield Turner, as CIA director. Turner begins a reorganization of the Agency, fires 820 employees, most in covert operations.
  
• 3/1/1977 De Mohrenschildt took a three-day leave of absence from his college job and flew to Holland with Oltmans. Oltmans recalled that De Mohrenschildt disappeared for awhile in Brussels.
  
• 3/1/1977 Gonzalez angrily resigned from HSCA, calling Sprague "an unconscionable scoundrel." Louis Stokes of Ohio was now appointed as the new chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
  
• 3/2/1977 House adopts a stringent new ethics code governing the finances of its members; income and gifts over $100 must be reported and a representative's outside income cannot exceed 15% of his salary.
  
• 3/3/1977 David Burnham - "Gonzalez, Assailing His Committee, Quits as Assassination Inquiry Head" - New York Times
  
• 3/6/1977 Henry Gonzalez leaves the Assassinations Committee. He criticizes committee members for trying to usurp his powers, attacking the Democratic leadership for failing to come to his rescue and for the last time hacking away at Richard Sprague.
  
• 3/8/1977 Louis Stokes becomes chairman of the HSCA.
  
• 3/8/1977 Between The Lines, 3/8/77: In an exclusive interview granted to Valley Publications, former undercover operative for the FBI, Harry Dean, has stated that the John Birch Society had a heavily armed network of citizen soldiers ready to take to the streets in late 1963 and early 1964, if President Johnson and Chief Justice Warren did not quickly find Lee Harvey Oswald (a supposed communist sympathizer) guilty of the murder of President Kennedy. The threat was delivered to Johnson and Warren, within a few days after the assassination, by intelligence sources and by agents of the power structure that eliminated the President. LBJ had the choice - nation-wide internal strife or knuckling under to the threat and thereby giving this minority force a position of recognition. Johnson opted for the second choice. Dean, an undercover operative for the FBI from 1960 to 1965, had been assigned by the FBI to infiltrate the Birch Society. In that role, he was active in the Covina, (Calif.) chapter of the JBS from 1962 through 1964. During Dean's tour with the Society he states they planned three major activities against John Kennedy: a planned assassination in Mexico City in 1962 that was called off: the assassination in Dallas; and the threat against a thorough investigation. In each case, according to Harry Dean, Congressman John Rousselot (R-San Marino) was involved in the planning. Rousselot was Western Director of the John Birch Society during the first half of the '60's. During the years when Harry Dean had been acting as an active member of the Covina Birch Society, the main meeting place for all the anti-Kennedy activities was at a residence on San Pierre Street in El Monte. The Birchers were connected with anti-Castro Cubans, often mentioned as assassination suspects, through the Drive Against Communist Aggression (DACA). The DACA was an anti-Communist organization directed by members of the JBS, which had attracted certain Cubans who were in the Los Angeles area during 1962-63, trying to enlist support for another invasion of Castro controlled Cuba. The DACA operated in Mexico as well as the U.S. According to Dean, World War II hero Guy (Gabby) Gabaldon was the Mexican Director, while Ray Flieshman of Whittier was the U.S. Director. Another active member of DACA and the Covina JBS, who had a close relationship with Gabaldon, was Dave Robbins, who at the time ('62-63), was a high ranking employee of the Fluor Corporation. (J. Robert Fluor and John Rousselot had been known to be close political allies.) In a number of different circumstances, Dean was able to determine that Gabaldon, Robbins, Flieshman, and Rousselot had been involved in planning the aborted assassination of JFK in Mexico City, June 1962. Harry Dean had many occasions to observe and relate with much publicized Cuban-American Loran Eugene Hall-aka Lorenzo Pacillo-aka Ship Hall and Laurence Howard-aka Alonzo Escuirdo. Hall and Howard had a close association with former General Edwin Walker, of Texas, whenever Walker visited the Covina JBS. Dean recalls specific meetings where Walker, Rousselot, Hall, Howard, Gabaldon and himself (Dean) laid the plans to frame Lee Harvey Oswald, who they thought was a communist, as the assassin. Per Dean, Hall and Howard left the San Pierre Street house in October 1963, with arms and medicines, and the plans to implicate Oswald. The subject of eliminating President Kennedy was never discussed as a subject of the Society's meetings, but Harry Dean claims the plans for the assassination were conceived in small group meetings. At one time or another Harry Dean was witness to the plans of the assassination of JFK by different combinations of John Rousselot, Loran Hall, Laurance Howard, Guy Gabaldon, Edwin Walker, Dave Robbins, Ray Fleishman, and not previously mentioned Covina JBS members Ed Peters and Ed Butler. According to Dean, the directions taken by John Kennedy were directly in opposition to the John Birch Society's ultimate goals and they, in conjunction with DACA, took matters into their own hands. To protect exposure through an investigation, the Society sent threats of nation-wide street warfare, to the administration via secret agents, who they were sure had infiltrated the various radical and reactionary organizations throughout the U.S., if a speedy and simple verdict was not the action.
  
• 3/9/1977 Carter announced plan to beginning withdrawing all forces from South Korea; much controversy erupted over this, but the plan was cancelled when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
  
• 3/9/1977 HSCA executive sessions.
  
• 3/11/1977 Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers sign an agreement with the Teamsters.
  
• 3/14/1977 De Mohrenschildt arrived in NY.
  
• 3/15/1977 Oltmans told the HSCA that De Mohrenschildt had told him that Oswald had acted with his knowledge when he killed JFK.
  
• 3/15/1977 de Mohrenschildt had a meeting with Edward Jay Epstein that had been arranged by the Reader's Digest magazine. Epstein offered him $4,000 for a four-day interview.
  
• 3/16/1977 Santos Trafficante appears before the House Assassinations Committee. Asked if he knew or discussed information that JFK would be assassinated, Trafficante declines to answer, citing his constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination.
  
• 3/16/1977 George de Mohrenschildt shows up at the door of Nancy Tilton, the sister of one of his earlier wives, asking to be let in. de Mohrenschildt's daughter, Alexandra, who regards this close aunt as her mother, lives in the Florida house. Her father, arriving with the clothes on his back and his briefcase, is invited to stay on as a house guest by Mrs. Tilton. Alexandra is shocked and saddened to find her father a "totally different" person. His daughter talked with him at length and found him to be deeply disturbed about certain matters and had expressed a desire to commit suicide. Earlier in the year, Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans went to Texas and brought de Morenschildt to Holland. After de Mohrenschildt arrived in Holland, Oltmans invited him out with some Russian friends. They went to Brussels and had plans to go to Liege, a city in the French speaking part of Belgium. The Oltmans owned a house not far from Liege in the countryside. Upon returning to Brussels, de Mohrenschildt went for a short walk from which he failed to return. He had earlier agreed to meet Oltmans and his friends for lunch. Oltmans waited for him but he didn't come back.
  
• 3/16/1977 Sprague offered to resign from HSCA if it would help the Committee's cause in Congress, but the Committee members refused.
  
• 3/17/1977 A letter written by George de Mohrenschildt, dated 3/17, was found in his room; TV reporters who saw it said that the letter told of Oltmans trying to bully him into admitting things he hadn't done. Oltmans may have been involved with Soviet intelligence, according to Michael Eddowes. (Oswald File 185-6)
  
• 3/18/1977 The following memo was suppressed until the 1990s:
  

AGENCY: HSCA
ORIGINATOR: HSCA
FROM: RICHARD SPRAGUE
TO: FILE
MEMORANDUM
March 18, 1977
TO : FILE
FROM : RICHARD A. SPRAGUE
William F. Illig, an attorney from Erie, Pa., contacted me in Philadelphia this
date, advising me that he represents Dr. George G. Burkley, Vice Admiral, U.S.
Navy retired, who had been the personal physician for presidents Kennedy and
Johnson.
Mr. Illig stated that he had a luncheon meeting with his client, Dr. Burkley,
this date to take up some tax matters. Dr. Burkley advised him that although he,
Burkley, had signed the death certificate of President Kennedy in Dallas, he had
never been interviewed and that he has information in the Kennedy
assassination indicating that others besides Oswald must have participated.
Illig advised me that his client is a very quiet, unassuming person, not wanting
any publicity whatsoever, but he, Illig, was calling me with his client's
consent and that his client would talk to me in Washington.

• 3/18/1977 Marien Ngouabi, Congo president, was shot to death in Brazzaville.
  
• 3/20/1977 New York Times reported a woman claiming her husband, a retired police officer, was offered half a million dollars to assassinate MLK. The man had written Rep. M.G. Snyder of Kentucky that FBI agents and several police officers were involved in the assassination.
  
• 3/20/1977 Dallas Morning News reported, "George de Mohrenschildt was having mental problems shortly before he told a Dutch journalist last month he knew in advance Lee Harvey Oswald was going to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, The Dallas News has learned. The 65-year-old Bishop College French professor agreed to commit himself to the psychiatric unit of Parkland Memorial Hospital last Nov. 9 after his wife filed court papers to force commitment, Dallas County Mental Illness Department records show. The hospital said De Mohrenschildt was released from the psychiatric unit about eight weeks later on Dec. 30, but declined to give information about his examination. The hospital did not refer De Mohrenschildt to the County Evaluation Center for further examination, which indicated he was not considered harmful to himself or others. The House Assassinations Committee last Tuesday quizzed a Dutch journalist and longtime De Mohrenschildt friend, Willem Oltmans, who said he had interviewed De Mohrenschildt last month at Bishop College. Oltmans did not say whether he had known of De Mohrenschildt's previous mental problems... He said to me, 'How do you think the media would react if I came out and said that I feel responsible for Oswald's behavior?' Oltmans said. The Oltmans interview developed into a national news story and sent investigators from the congressional committee scurrying to Dallas in search of De Mohrenschildt and his acquaintances. As of Friday, however, the probers had not inquired about his records with the Dallas County Mental Illness Department. In response to a request from The Dallas News, which asked that court records regarding De Mohrenschildt's mental illness proceedings be made accessible because such action is in the public interest,' Probate Judge Joseph E. Ashmore Jr. did so. Congressional committee investigators have been working on the De Mohrenschildt case under the impression he disappeared after he left Bishop College March 1. Oltmans told the probers he accompanied De Mohrenschildt to Europe after he left the college on a leave of absence of several days and then lost contact with him. Bishop College officials said while De Mohrenschildt had not been heard from, they still expect him to return after the school's spring vacation ends Monday."
  
• 3/27/1977 George de Mohrenschildt arrived at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach and spent the day being interviewed by Epstein. According to Epstein, they spent the day talking about his life and career up until the late 1950s.
  
• 3/28/1977 Charles Niccoletti dies of multiple gunshot wounds in Chicago. Niccoletti was a hitman and enforcer for Sam Giancana. He was also the Mafia's replacement for Johnny Roselli in the area of anti-Castro activities. Niccoletti left the mob after Giancana's murder saying that the CIA "was taking over the operation." Just as the House Assassinations Committee is trying to find him for questioning about a possible link between the Castro assassination attempts and JFK's murder, he is shot three times in the head while sitting in his car. The car is then set on fire to destroy the evidence.
  
• 3/29/1977 After a few days of interviews, Edward Jay Epstein asked de Mohrenschildt about Lee Harvey Oswald. As he wrote in his diary: "Then, this morning, I asked him about why he, a socialite in Dallas, sought out Oswald, a defector. His explanation, if believed, put the assassination in a new and unnerving context. He said that although he had never been a paid employee of the CIA, he had "on occasion done favors" for CIA connected officials. In turn, they had helped in his business contacts overseas. By way of example, he pointed to the contract for a survey of the Yugoslavian coast awarded to him in 1957. He assumed his "CIA connections" had arranged it for him and he provided them with reports on the Yugoslav officials in whom they had expressed interest."
  
• 3/29/1977 Epstein and de Mohrenschildt, broke for lunch and decided to meet again at 3 p.m. George De Mohrenschildt returned to his room where he found a card from Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
  
• 3/29/1977 Just hours before his death, George de Mohrenschildt told Edward J. Epstein that the CIA asked him to keep tabs on Oswald in Dallas during 1962. Epstein interviewed George in the spring of '76 in Dallas, and today in a Palm Beach hotel room. He also interviewed numerous relatives and associates of his. George told Epstein in 1977 that he would have stopped associating with Oswald if Walter Moore hadn't told him Oswald was "harmless." Moore has refused to comment since then about his involvement with De Mohrenschildt. George suspected the FBI and possibly others of breaking into his premises at other times, as well. (Legend 185-87,315) Posner says that de Mohrenschildt "was quite mad by the time he gave his final interview. For nearly a year before his death, he was paranoid, fearful that the 'FBI and Jewish mafia' were out to kill him. He twice tried to kill himself with drug overdoses, and another time cut his wrists and submerged himself in a bathtub. After he began waking in the middle of every night, screaming and beating himself, he wife finally committed him to the Parkland Hospital psychiatric unit, where he was diagnosed as pyschotic and given two months of intensive shock therapy. After his treatment he said he had been with Oswald on the day of the assassination, though he was actually with dozens of guests at the Bulgarian embassy in Haiti the day JFK was killed." (Case Closed 119; no source given for this information) At the time of George's suicide, someone had left a tape recorder running to record a TV program; the tape picked up the sound of someone walking across a room, opening a drawer (where there was a 20-gauge shotgun) and then someone walking away. Then there is a single shot, and later Alexandra's screams as she discovers her father's body. (The Oswald File 184-5) In that March 29, 1977, interview, the last he would ever give, George de Mohrenschildt told author Edward Jay Epstein he had "on occasion done favors " since the early 1950s for government officials connected with the CIA. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. The CIA contacts then helped de Mohrenschildt arrange profitable business connections overseas. De Mohrenschildt said that in late 1961 he had met in Dallas with the CIA's J. Walton Moore, who began to tell him a bout "an ex-American Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in Minsk for the past year and in whom there was 'interest. "' The Baron had grown up in Minsk, as Moore seemed to know before being told. The ex-Marine, Moore said, would be returning to the Dallas area . De Mohrenschildt felt he was being primed. In the summer of 1 962, de Mohrenschildt said, he was handed Lee Harvey Oswald's address in Fort Worth by " one of Moore's associates, " who suggested that de Mohrenschildt meet Oswald. De Mohrenschildt then phoned Moore to confirm such a mission and set up another mutually beneficial relationship. He told Moore he would appreciate help from the U.S. embassy in Haiti in arranging approval by Haitian dictator " Papa Doc " Duvalier for an oil exploration deal. Moore then gave de Mohrenschildt the go-ahead to befriend the Oswalds, which de Mohrenschildt promptly didwith the firm understanding that he was carrying out the CIA's wishes. " I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years i f Moore had not sanctioned it, " de Mohrenschildt said in his final interview. " Too much was at stake . " (Epstein, Assassination Chronicles)
  
• 3/29/1977 Three hours after his revelation of the CIA's sanctioning his contact with Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to death in the house where he was staying in Manalapan, Florida. His death also occurred on the day Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, left his card with de Mohrenschildt's daughter and told her he would be calling her father that evening for an appointment to question him. Soon after de Mohrenschildt took the card and put it in his pocket, he went upstairs, then apparently put the barrel of a .20-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. On the day of de Mohrenschildt's death, Edward Jay Epstein, the author who had interviewed him that day, wrote the following diary entry (29 March 1977): David Bludworth, The State's Attorney, was a folksy, charming and savvy interrogator. He began by telling me that de Mohrenschildt had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself at 3:45 p.m. There were no witnesses and no one home at the time of the shooting. The precise time of his death was established by a tape-recorder, left running that afternoon to record the soap operas for the absent Mrs. Tilton, and which recorded a single set of footfalls in the room and the blast of the shotgun, which was found on the Persian carpet next to him. No suicide note or other clue was found. He said I was probably the last person to talk to him. Then, he asked whether I had in my possession De Mohrenschildt's black address book. I replied "No." He politely rephrased the question, and asked me again about a half-dozen times, whether I had the black book.
  
• 3/29/1977 After a meeting with Stokes on 29th March, Sprague agreed to resign and he was replaced by G. Robert Blakey. But the next morning, after the news of George de Mohrenschildt's death the previous day, Congress approved $2.5 million for a year. Sprague later told Gaeton Fonzi that the real reason he was removed as chief counsel was because he insisted on asking questions about the CIA operations in Mexico. Fonzi argued that "Sprague... wanted complete information about the CIA's operation in Mexico City and total access to all its employees who may have had anything to do with the photographs, tape recordings and transcripts. The Agency balked. Sprague pushed harder. Finally the Agency agreed that Sprague could have access to the information if he agreed to sign a CIA Secrecy Agreement. Sprague refused.... "How," he asked, "can I possible sign an agreement with an agency I'm supposed to be investigating?" Two subcommittees were created - a subcommittee on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with Richardson Preyer of North Carolina as its chairman, and a subcommittee on the assassination of Martin Luther King, with Walter E. Fauntroy, Delegate of the District of Columbia, as its chairman. The staff was divided into two task forces designated to assist each of the subcommittees.
  
• 3/30/1977 The Assassinations Committee is revived today by the passage of House Resolution 433, reconstituting the Committee until Jan. 3, 1979, and assigning it a pared-down budget of $2.5 million. The House votes 230 to 181. The trade off: Richard Sprague has to go. Congressman Louis Stokes of Ohio becomes the new committee chairman and a search for Sprague's successor begins. The House approved House Resolution 433 which constituted the HSCA until January 3, 1979, the duration of the 95th Congress.
  
• 3/31/1977 HSCA director Richard Sprague resigned. Rep. Louis Stokes was then named chairman.
  
• 3/31/1977 Edward Jay Epstein diary: March 31, 1977 Palm Beach Two FBI agents arrived at my hotel. They were both polite and precise in their questions. They asked me how I had located De Mohrenschildt in Florida. They explained that Just two weeks before he had turned up in Florida, De Mohrenschildt had literally "vanished" from the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, leaving his luggage, raincoat and pipe behind in his room-- just minutes before he had been scheduled to meet with a Soviet diplomat. After he was reported missing in Belgium, he had reportedly flown from London and New York. They wanted to know if De Mohrenschildt had not given me any of his personal papers. When I said "No," they thanked me for my time and left. There was a phone message from Nancy, who had gone back to New York. The lawyer, Pat Russell, had sent the photograph. It was, as De Mohrenschildt had described it, a copy of the celebrated backyard photograph of Oswald with the rifle that appeared in the Warren Report. But on the back it had a date and handwriting. A handwriting expert who had been working with me, Thea Hall, immediately identified both the dating and the inscription as Oswald's writing concluded the Russian printing on reverse side was consistent with Marina's handwriting. So now I knew De Mohrenschildt had been given this incriminating photograph before the assassination but it did not answer the real issue of whether he had passed it on to the CIA.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 4/1977 HSCA Director Tanenbaum resigned.
  
• 4/1/1977 Oltmans told NBC-TV and the AP that George had told him he and Oswald were hired by anti-Castro Cubans and Dallas oilmen to kill JFK, and that the Cuban exiles had actually done the shooting, not Oswald (or that Oswald was one of 4 assassins). They aired footage from a filmed interview Oltmans had done with GdM in 1968, where George denied that Texas oilmen were involved in the assassination.
  
• 4/1/1977 Jeanne de Mohrenschildt gave the House Select Committee on Assassinations a photograph taken of Lee Harvey Oswald, by his wife Marina, standing in his Dallas backyard holding two newspapers and a rifle, and with a pistol on his hip. The existence of this print, while similar to others which had been found among Oswald's effects on November 23, 1963, was previously unknown. On the back was written To my friend George from Lee Oswald, and the date "5/IV/63" [this is in non-USA convention with day in front and month in Roman numerals, and means 5 April 1963. It is worth noting that the US military uses the day/month/year format, though does not utilize Roman numerals.] along with the words "Copyright Geo de M"' and a Russian phrase translated as "'Hunter of fascists, ha-ha-ha!" Handwriting specialists later concluded that the words "To my friend George…" and Oswald's signature were written by Lee Harvey Oswald, but could not determine whether the rest was the writing of Lee Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt or Marina Oswald. Some historians have speculated the Russian line was written by Marina, in sarcasm. (George de Mohrenschildt in his memoir translated it as "This is the hunter of fascists, ha, ha, ha!" and also assumed that Marina had written it sarcastically). George de Mohrenschildt wrote in his manuscript (reference and pages cited above) that he had missed Oswald's photograph in packing for the move to Haiti in May, 1963, and this was why he hadn't mentioned it to the Warren Commission (though he had noted in his manuscript that Oswald had a rifle in April, 1963, and scoffed to Lee that he had missed General Walker, remembering that Lee had blanched at the joke). According to de Mohrenschildt, the photo was not found among his stored papers until his wife found it in 1967. When analyzed by the HSCA in 1977, this photo turned out to be a first generation print of the backyard photo already known to the Warren commission as CE-133A, and which had probably been taken on March 31, 1963.
  
• 4/4/1977 "The Fort Worth Star-Telegram/AP: A Texas patrolman says he recalls seeing more than three bullet fragments taken from the wounds of former Texas Gov. John Connally the day President John Kennedy was assassinated, according to the Dallas Morning News. In a copyright story yesterday, the News said Patrolman Charles W. Harbison, who guarded Connally's room at Parkland Hospital, as saying he recalls turning over to an FBI agent more than three fragments. Connally was wounded in the same shooting spree that killed President Kennedy here Nov. 22, 1963. The Warren Commission identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin and asserted that he alone was responsible. The News said Harbison's story is doubly significant when coupled with the recollection of Miss Audrey Bell, operating supervisor at Parkland at the time of the assassination. Harbison was interviewed by the News Saturday. However, yesterday morning he said he ""can't testify to the number of fragments,"" and is not about to be ""pinned down"" as to the exact number. ""I was standing there in the hall and someone, I don't know who handed me the fragments,"" Harbison said yesterday. ""I glanced at them, then turned and gave them to another man. And a second man told me to go down the hall where they were taking the governor."" Harbison said he wasn't sure who he gave the fragments to, but surmised it was a federal agent SINCE THEY WERE THE ONLY PERSONS OTHER THAN AUTHORIZED MEDICAL STAFF PERMITTED IN THAT PARTICULAR PART OF THE HOSPITAL. Miss Bell last week said she recalls that she was given FOUR OR FIVE OTHER BULLET FRAGMENTS taken from Connally. The News said the two separate groups of fragments now MAKE A TOTAL OF AT LEAST EIGHT FRAGMENTS PURPORTEDLY FOUND IN CONNALLY FROM WHAT THE WARREN COMMISSION DESCRIBED AS A ""NEARLY WHOLE BULLET"" THAT ALLEGEDLY FELL ONTO CONNALLY'S STRETCHER WITH ONLY A FRACTION OF ITS WEIGHT MISSING. Investigators for the House Assassinations Committee say they believe the bullet, which supposedly struck Kennedy in the BACK and then passed through Connally's body, WOULD HAVE WEIGHED TOO MUCH IF MORE THAN THREE FRAGMENTS WERE REMOVED, the News said. The newspaper said investigators have already interviewed Miss Bell and concluded her testimony, if proven true, COULD DISCREDIT ""THE VERY CORNERSTONE OF THE ENTIRE WARREN COMMISSION REPORT."" Miss Bell, however, in a television interview, said she did not weigh the bullet fragments and had no way of proving other than her recollection that there were more than three fragments given her in the operating room. She said she later turned them over to two men she believed to be FBI or Secret Service agents. NEITHER MISS BELL NOR HARBISON WERE INTERVIEWED BY THE WARREN COMMISSION. "
  
• 4/6/1977 Carlos Prío Socarras, the former president of Cuba prior to Batista, is found dead in front of his garage in Miami. He has been shot through the chest, twice, by a .45 caliber pistol. The authorities rule the case a suicide. He is on the list of persons to be questioned by the HSCA. Miami Beach Patrolman Ed Avila, himself a Cuban exile who recalls that as a boy in Cuba he lunched with his grandfather and Prío, finds Prío sitting in the chair, bleeding. Avla asks him three questions in Spanish: "I talked to him and he nodded yes and no. I asked him if he was hurting, if he was in pain, and he nodded no. I asked him if anybody shot him and he nodded no. I asked him if he shot himself and he nodded yes," Avila says.
  
• 4/8/1977 Israel: Yitzhak Rabin withdrew as his party's candidate when it became known that he and his wife had retained bank accounts in the US, in violation of Israeli law.
  
• 4/10/1977 Abdullah al-Henjiri, ex-prime minister of Yemen, his wife, and the Yemen embassy minister were fatally shot in London by Zohair Akache, a Palestinian terrorist.
  
• 4/11/1977 at approximately 11:30 local reporter Bill O'Reilly came to the Dallas Field Office with a camera crew and asked to speak with J. Walton Moore. O'Reilly was not permitted to come into the office and J. Walton Moore spoke to him on the telephone in the outer foyer. O'Reilly said he was doing a story on his news program at 1800 hours on CIA involvement in the Kennedy Assassination. Specifically he was going to allege that Moore knew Lee Harvey Oswald and he wanted to give Moore an opportunity to tell his side of the story. Moore said he would not discuss the matter with O'Reilly and would answer questions only to the properly designated authorities. O'Reilly and his crew left after taking some pictures in the foyer.
  

Following is a transcript of O'Reilly's program which appeared on the program at 1800 and 2200 hours 11 April:
Iola Johnson Channel 8 News Reporter: ...the CIA and the FBI have been suppressing evidence vital to the Kennedy assassination investigation. Channel 8's Bill O'Reilly has been looking into the CIA's role in the investigation and has this report.
Bill O'Reilly Channel 8 News Reporter: Channel 8 News has learned that a recently declassified document now in the hands of a writer indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald was employed by the CIA possibly in 1962 and although it may be a coincidence, Oswald's 1962 income tax return is the only one which has not been made public. In a related matter Mrs. Jeanne de Mohrenschildt (sic Jean) wife of the late George de Mohrenschildt, told Channel 8 News that she and her husband were good friends with a Dallas CIA agent named J. Walton Moore and that Moore told George de Mohrenschildt Lee Harvey Oswald was OK to recommend for a job.
Mrs. George de Mohrenschildt: He checked with J. Walton Moore about Oswald. He checked with him [sic] is OK to recommend for a job. He said perfectly clear.
Bill O'Reilly: After the assassination you were still friends with J. Walton Moore and he still came over to dinner once in a while with his wife.
Mrs. de Mohrenschildt: We have not seen him because we had been gone almost a year in Haiti.
Bill O'Reilly: Yes, but when you came back to Dallas.
Mrs. de Mohrenschildt: When we came back J. Walton Moore wouldn't talk to us.
Bill O'Reilly: Why?
Mrs. De Mohrenschildt: How do I know?
Bill O'Reilly: He wouldn't talk to you.
Mrs. de Mohrenschildt: No, I called up and invited him for dinner, because we thought maybe he knows more than we do. He wouldn't come.
Bill O'Reilly: J. Walton Moore is still with the CIA, and we went to his office in the Federal Building to get his reaction to Mrs de Mohrenschildt's story.
Bill O'Reilly talking to J. Walton Moore from the outer office. Mr. Moore's voice cannot be heard.
Bill O'Reilly: We have somebody on camera who is going to say that you knew Lee Harvey Oswald. We would just like to get your comments on it. No comment at all. What would you recommend that I do then? To be fair to you, what would you recommend that I do. You'll just take your chances. O.K. Mr. Moore, thank you.
Bill O'Reilly: After speaking with Mr. Moore we spoke with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They told us they were astonished by Mrs. DeMohrenschildt's statements but would not comment on any matter pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy. [End of Transcript of WFAA TV News Report]

• 4/12/1977 Richard Sprague fires back at his critics in a New Orleans States-Item story today. Suggesting that Congress is not the place to conduct any kind of erious investigation, he states: "In a crime investigation you need somebody in command. It can't be politicians who are thinking of what headlines and votes they may garner. After Sprague leaves Washington, Joe Rauh tells Jerry Policoff, "You know, I never thought the Kennedy case was a conspiracy until now. But if they can do that to Dick Sprague it must have been."
  
• 4/27/1977 During the HSCA, Walter Fauntroy, one of the members studying the King assassination, charged that reporters covering the HSCA were linked to the CIA and suggested the HSCA might investigate them. A few days later, for reasons about which we can readily speculate, Fauntroy backed down, saying the HSCA had "no plans now or in the future" to seek testimony of journalists regarding their possible ties to the intelligence community. ( Three Assassinations, Volume 2 (New York: Facts on File, 1978), p. 245. Fauntroy's original charge was made 4/27/77)
  
• 5/4/1977 In a David Frost interview program, Nixon made his first public comments since resigning. He admitted failing to enforce the laws and letting the American people down, but denied that he had committed any crimes or impeachable acts. He admitted that he "screwed up" the Watergate affair but placed most of the blame on the press and his political opponents. Nixon felt that he had put himself in the role of a "defense attorney" in protecting Haldeman and Erlichman: "I will admit that during acting as lawyer for their defense, I was not prosecuting the case...I don't think of it as a coverup...there are some friends who say 'Just face them [his opponents] down. There is a conspiracy to get you.' There may have been. I don't know what the CIA had to do. Some of their shenanigans have yet to be told, according to a book I read recently...However, I don't go with the idea that there...that what brought me down was a coup..." He insisted his motives were purely political, not criminal. Nixon was paid $600,000 to appear on Frost's program.
  
• 5/7/1977 The AP reported that "the CIA used as many as 16 agents a day to spy on...[Jack] Anderson and his staff in 1972 to determine the sources of his news stories, according to newly released files...The spying operation, approved in January 1972, continued until April 12, 1972..." Anderson got the documents through the FOIA as part of a suit against Nixon and other government officials for violating his constitutional rights.
  
• 5/9/1977 Carter calls for a hike in Social Security taxes to restore the program's "fiscal integrity."
  
• 5/13/1977 KRLD radio talk show host, Lou Staples is found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. The death is ruled a suicide. Staples conducted a historic interview concerning the JFK assassination with reporter Dan Rather. Staples made a public claim that he was going to break the assassination case. Staples had done a good many of his radio talk shows on the Kennedy assassination and the response to the programs was overwhelming. He dies near Yukon, Oklahoma. Though his death is ruled a suicide, the bullet that kills him enters behind his right temple. Lou Staples is left-handed.
  
• 5/18/1977 In Review of the News, May 18, 1977, historian Arnold Toynbee describes the need for a "world police force", saying "local states ought to be deprived of their sovereignty and subordinated to the sovereignty of a global world government. The world state will need an armed police force to command force to impose peace."
  
• 5/19/1977 "When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal." Richard Nixon, interviewed by the BBC's David Frost
  
• 5/21/1977 Carter fired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub for publicly opposing Carter's plan to withdraw ground forces from South Korea.
  
• 5/27/1977The President of CBS News, Richard Salant, confirms today that CBS had connections with the CIA that had been formed back in the mid-1950's. Salant further states that these ties had been forged by CBS Chairman William Paley and Sig Mickelson, Salant's predecessor. Salant also states that, as a matter of routine form, any CBS foreign correspondents returning to the United States after assignment were traditionally "debriefed" by (then) CIA Director Allen Dulles.
  
• 6/1977 Up until now, most of the media coverage of illegal aliens has concentrated on draining welfare funds, creating unemployment, and not paying taxes into a system from which they benefit. To receive welfare, proof of citizenship is required, which the illegal alien does not have, and the illegal alien is not causing unemployment since the state has tried to get the urban poor to take the jobs in the fields, and failed. The urban poor could make more on welfare and unemployment than accepting these jobs. Also, not many people would accept below minimum wage, long hours, or nonappealing jobs. Most employers, therefore, benefit from illegal aliens in that they can demand more for less; they also use threats of calling the border patrol to keep workers under extreme working conditions. An example of this inhuman profiteering is Senator Barry Goldwater's brother, Robert, who has been hiring illegal aliens for more than a decade. After he paid over $100 to have them smuggled in, he then paid them as little as $5 for a dawn-to-dusk work day. Their living conditions were horrible, and they lived like rats in homes made of crates. Even though they were required to pay taxes, they were unable to collect benefits from welfare or unemployment. Ironically, millions of dollars are being spent to apprehend, detain, and repatriate illegal aliens, however, three times as many people continue to get through the security barriers than are returned or detained. The media tells only one side of the story of the illegal aliens and ignores the other side of this story; this is why this story has been nominated as one of the "ten best censored stories for 1977." SOURCES: New West, "California's Illegal Aliens, They Give More Than They Take," p. 26, also "How Illegal Aliens Pay as They Go," p. 34; by Jonathan Kirsch and Anthony Cook, May 23, 1977. In These Times, "Illegal Aliens the New Scapegoat," June 1-7, 1977,p.6.
  
• 6/1/1977 James Gouchenaur today recalls a conversation with Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, who expressed remorse for badgering Dr. Malcolm Perry into changing his testimony about the entrance wound in JFK's throat. On the day of the assassination, Dr. Perry thrice described the throat wound as an entrance wound.
  
• 6/3/1977 US and Cuba agree to exchange diplomatic missions in each others' countries.
  
• 6/4/1977 While most of us think slavery is a thing of the past, the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights (est. 1834) knows better. Each year they prepare a report documenting each case o£ slavery and present it to the U.N. The report goes to the new Working Group of Experts on Slavery under the United Nations Human Rights Sub-Commission. There the detailed and documented case studies are debated and passed on. Nothing else is done. When the U.N., in 1956, adopted the convention against the practice of slavery, it was estimated that 62 million people were classifiable as slaves. In 1975, the experts unanimously reported that the sum of slavery in the world had not diminished in the last decade. Of the 147 U.N. members, only 85 have ratified the anti-slavery convention. The last decade has seen an increasing sensitivity about slavery and most nations have "abolished" the practice. Still, it is a practice deeply embedded in many cultures. As late as 1967, the Defense Minister of the South Arabian Federation showed up in London with one of his slaves. Here is a brief survey of slavery in the modern world as the Anti-Slavery Society and the United Nations see it: Chattel slavery: Arabian Peninsula and the Sudan, Mindanao, Guinea, Paraguay, Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, and Pakistan. Debt bondage: India, Burma, Columbia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. Serfdom: It is widespread in Latin America and still found in Afghanistan, Ecuador, Ethiopia and Peru. Sham adoption and exploitation of children: Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Latin America and West Africa. (The 10 year old bought in Sierra Leone and brought to the U.S. as a slave would fall in this category -- S.F. Chronicle, March 4, 1978.) Traffic in persons (white slavery): This still exists but mostly falls under the jurisdiction of INTERPOL. This is an important story because most people do not know slavery still exists, and most Americans do not know that the United States is one of the nations not ratifying the Anti-Slavery Convention. These reasons qualify this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1977. SOURCE: Donald Katz, New Republic, June 4, 1977, p. 19-21.
  
• 6/6/1977 The New York Times attacked the HSCA, saying that after 8 months of work nothing new had been discovered, and much of what the Committee did have was being spoon-fed to it by Mark Lane. The confidential source told the Times, "...much that witnesses tell us is in conflict with what they supposedly told people who have written books about the assassinations and who had provided the basic leads for the committee to pursue."
  
• 6/10/1977 James Earl Ray and six others escaped from Brushy Mountain prison by going over the wall while guards are distracted.
  
• 6/10/1977 HSCA member Sen. Robert Morgan stated on CBS-TV, "I believe that the circumstances in this case are so strong that they convince me beyond every reasonable doubt that the assassination of our President was an act of retaliation for what we had tried to do in eliminating Castro."
  
• 6/12/1977 David Berkowitz gets 25 years to life for the Son of Sam murders in New York.
  
• 6/13/1977 Ray is recaptured in the woods eight miles from the prison.
  
• 6/20/1977 G. Robert Blakey is appointed chief counsel and staff director of HSCA. Carl Stokes announces that the House Assassinations Committee has found a replacement for Sprague: G. Robert Blakey, a law professor at Cornell University. Blakey is an organized crime specialist who has served in Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department from 1960-64. At the joint Stokes-Blakey press conference announcing his appointment, Blakey states that, "The purpose of this news conference is to announce there will not be any more news conferences."
  
• 6/20/1977 Alternative 3' fake documentary aired in the UK. Jerome Clark notes that many UFO conspiracy theory tales "can be traced to a mock documentary, Alternative 3, broadcast on British television on June 20, 1977, and subsequently turned into a paperback book."
  
• 6/24/1977 the New Times had a quote from De Mohrenschildt as saying that Oswald had remarked about JFK: "If he succeeds he will be the greatest President in the history of the country."
  
• 6/24/1977 From Dick Russell's article published in New Times Magazine: Like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Baron George Sergei de Mohrenschildt was borne back ceaselessly into the past. In June 1976, a sultry day in Dallas, he had stood gazing out the picture window of his second-story apartment, talking casually about a young man who used to curl up on the couch with the Baron's Great Danes. "No matter what they say, Lee Harvey Oswald was a delightful guy," de Mohrenschildt was saying. "They make a moron out of him, but he was smart as hell. Ahead of his time really, a kind of hippie of those days. In fact, he was the most honest man I knew. And I will tell you this - I am sure he did not shoot the president." Nine months later, on March 29, one hour after an investigator for the House Assassinations Committee left a calling-card with his daughter, the Baron apparently put a shotgun to his head in Palm Beach, Florida. In his absence came forward a Dutch journalist and longtime acquaintance, Willem Oltmans, with the sensational allegation that de Mohrenschildt had admitted serving as a middleman between Oswald and H. L. Hunt in an assassination plot involving other Texas oilmen, anti-Castro Cubans, and elements of the FBI and CIA. But how credible was de Mohrenschildt? As an old friend in Dallas' Russian community, George Bouhe, once put it: "He's better equipped than anybody to talk. But we have an old Russian proverb that will always apply to George de Mohrenschildt: "The soul of the other person is in the darkness."' Intrigue and oil were the two constants in the Baron's life. He was an emigrant son of the Czarist nobility who spoke five languages fluently and who, during the Second World War, was rumored to have spied for the French, Germans, Soviets and Latin Americans (the CIAs predecessor, the OSS, turned down his application). After the war, he went on to perform geological surveys for major U.S. oil companies all over South America, Europe and parts of Africa. He became acquainted with certain of Texas' more influential citizens - oilman John Mecom, construction magnates George and Herman Brown. In Mexico, he gained audience in 1960 with Soviet First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. In 1961 he was present in Guatemala City - by his account, on a "walking tour" - when the Bay of Pigs troops set out for Cuba. Finally, when Lee and Marina Oswald returned to Texas from the Soviet Union in June 1962, the Baron soon became their closest friend. Why? Why would a member of the exclusive Dallas Petroleum Club take under his wing a Trotsky-talking sheet-metal worker some 30 years his junior? The Warren Commission took 118 pages of his testimony to satisfy itself of de Mohrenschildt's benign intent, but among critics the question persisted: Was the Baron really "baby-sitting" Oswald for the CIA? While de Mohrenschildt told the commission he'd never served as any government's agent "in any respect whatsoever," a CIA file for the commission, declassified in 1976, admits having used him as a source. In the course of several meetings with a man from its Dallas office upon de Mohrenschildt's return from Yugoslavia late in 1957, "the CIA representative obtained foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in ten separate reports."The Dallas official, according to the file, maintained "informal occasional contact" with the Baron until the fall of 1961. The Warren Commission volumes, however, contain only passing reference in de Mohrenschildt's testimony to a government man named "G. Walter Moore." His true name was J. Walton Moore, and he had served the CIA in Dallas since its inception in 1947. In two brief, cryptic interviews with me in the 18 months before his death, de Mohrenschildt claimed he would not have struck up his relationship with Oswald "if Jim Moore hadn't told me Oswald was safe." The Baron wouldn't elaborate on that statement, except to hint that it constituted some kind of clearance. J. Walton Moore is now a tall, white-haired man in his middle sixties, who continues to operate out of Dallas' small CIA office. Questioned at his home one summer evening in 1976 about de Mohrenschildt's remarks, he conceded knowing the Baron as a "pleasant sort of fellow" who provided "some decent information" after a trip to Yugoslavia. "To the best of my recollection, I hadn't seen de Mohrenschildt for a couple of years before the assassination," Moore added. "I don't know where George got the idea that I cleared Oswald for him. I never met Oswald. I never heard his name before the assassination." For sure, the CIA did maintain an interest in de Mohrenschildt at least through April 1963. That month, Oswald left Texas for New Orleans and de Mohrenschildt prepared to depart for a lucrative geological survey contract in Haiti. On April 29, according to a CIA Office of Security file, also declassified in 1976, "[Deleted] Case Officer had requested an expedite check of GEORGE DE MOHRENSCHILDT for reasons unknown to Security." There is one alleged ex-CIA contract employee, now working for an oil company in Los Angeles, prepared to testify that de Mohrenschildt was the overseer of an aborted CIA plot to overthrow Haitian President Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier in June 1963. The existence of such a plot was examined, but apparently couldn't be substantiated, by the Church Committee. Herb Atkin is sure the plot did exist. "I knew de Mohrenschildt as Philip Harbin," Atkin said when contacted by telephone a few days after the Baron's suicide. "A lot of people in Washington have claimed that Harbin did not exist. But he's the one that ran me from the late fifties onward. I'm certain that de Mohrenschildt was my case officer's real name." If so, the Harbin alias may have a readily identifiable origin. De Mohrenschildt's fourth wife, Jeanna, was born in Harbin, China. One summer day in 1976, still in her bathrobe, she sat at a dining room table cluttered with plants and dishes and watched her husband begin to pace the floor. "Of course, the truth of the assassination has not come out," she said. "It will never come out. But we know it was a vast conspiracy." The Baron turned to face her. "Oswald," he said, "was a harmless lunatic." At our first interview, I had asked de Mohrenschildt what he knew about the recurring reports of Oswald in the presence of Cubans. He had nodded agreement. "Oswald probably did not know himself who they were," he replied. "I myself was in a little bit of danger from those Cubans, but I don't know who they are. Criminal lunatics."When I broached the subject now in the presence of his wife, de Mohrenschildt said something to her in Russian. She then answered for him: "That's a different story. But one must examine the anti-Castro motive of the time. After the Bay of Pigs." A few months later, de Mohrenschildt was committed by his wife to the psychiatric unit of Parkland Memorial Hospital. There were rumors of a book naming CIA names in connection with Oswald, squirreled away with his wife's attorney. According to journalist Oltmans, upon leaving the hospital de Mohrenschildt told him: "They're going to kill me or put me away forever. You've got to get me out of the country." In March, the Baron took a leave-of-absence from his French professorship at Dallas' virtually all-black Bishop College. He flew with Oltmans to Belgium, wandered away during lunch, and wound up in Florida at his daughter's home. There, a tape machine being used to transcribe a television program is said to have recorded his suicide.
  
• 6/30/1977 production of B-1 Bomber stopped because it was not thought to be cost-effective.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1/1977 the NATO base Aviano, which was closed for flying due to a parade being prepared, had a close encounter. At about 3.00am a USAF guard observed a strange object hovering above an area known as 'Victor Alert', which housed 2 secret jet fighters, in a large hanger. The object was described as a large spinning top, 45m in diameter and hovering very low above the hanger. The upper surface was domed shaped and had white, red and green lights emitting from its surface. The USAF guard reported the incident and a team of military guards were sent to the hanger. The guards surrounded the area and radar personnel were contacted to see if they could pick the object up on their equipment. However, when then tried to access the radar consoles the base was hit by a mysterious power-cut. The incident went all the way up to NATO headquarters in Brussels, but when questioned by various UFO researchers they were told that the encounter had been a misperception of the moon shining off some low clouds !
  
• 7/11/1977 Chile: Pinochet announced that the government would be reforming into a sort of authoritarian democracy, with parliamentary elections in the early '80s.
  
• 7/13/1977 Baltimore Sun - "Towson Gunsmith Tells Panel JFK Was Killed Accidentally by Secret Service Agent"
  
• 7/20/1977 Leon Jaworski is appointed by the House Ethics Committee to investigate the scandal involving bribes of US congressmen by a South Korean lobbyist.
  
• 7/21/1977 Carter spoke of how Americans and Russians both yearned for peace; Brezhnev responded favorably.
  
• 7/22/1977 Deng Xiaoping is named vice premier of China.
  
• 7-8/1977 President Carter's "UFO" Is Identified as the Planet Venus by Robert Sheaffer (published in The Humanist magazine, July-August, 1977, p.46) President Jimmy Carter's widely-reported "UFO sighting," which he made public while Governor of Georgia, was in fact a misidentification of the planet Venus. Several errors of identification within Mr. Carter's report demonstrate that the eyewitness testimony of even a future president of the United States cannot be taken at face value when investigating UFO sightings. The incident occurred in Leary, Georgia, about forty miles from Plains, on the evening of January 6, 1969. Mr. Carter was the local district governor of the Lion's Club, and had come to Leary to boost the local chapter.
  
• 8/1977 Joseph C. Ayres dies in a shooting accident this month. Ayres was the Chief Steward on JFK's Air Force One.
  
• 8/1977 Alan Belmont, FBI agent, also dies this month. Belmont was J. Edgar Hoover's special assistant to the Warren commission.
  
• 8/1977 FBI document expert, James Cadigan, who testified before the Warren Commission -- dies from "a fall in his home."
  
• 8/1/1977 Francis Gary Powers dies in a mysterious helicopter crash. He is 47 yrs. old. Powers was the U-2 pilot shot down by a Russian missile over Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1960 -- within 180 days of LHO's defection to Russia. President Carter approves having Powers buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
  
• 8/3/1977 Washington Post story by George Lardner Jr. and John Jacobs: "Lengthy Mind-Control Research by CIA is Detailed."
  
• 8/3/1977 On the Senate floor, Senator Ted Kennedy said: "The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. [Frank] Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers."
  
• 8/4/1977 Congress creates the Dept of Energy and confirms James Schlesinger as its first Secretary
  
• 8/4/1977 Washington Post reported that CIA agent George White and other operatives had set up apartments to be used for prostitutes as they brought back clients, who would then be drugged and observed by agents behind two-way mirrors. One of the things the CIA was interested in was determining if particular drugs could be used to cause someone to behave in an abberant way so the victim could be discredited in public. They also tried to induce amnesia, render a subject naturally suggestible, alter sexual patterns, elicit information and create dependency in a subject. (Also NYT 9/20/77)
  
• 8/10/1977 Moshe Dayan told Cyrus Vance, "When you accept our views we shall be in full agreement with you."
  
• 8/12/1977 The Space Shuttle Enterprise completes its first test flight.
  
• 8/13/1977 the Chicago Tribune reported: CIA Director Stansfield Turner has disclosed that the agency found a man who could "see" what was going on anywhere in the world through his psychic powers. Scientists and officials would show the man a picture of a place and he would then describe any activity going on there at that time. The tight-lipped CIA chief wouldn't reveal how accurate the man was, but said the agency dropped the project in 1975. "He died," Turner said, "and we haven't heard from him since." Under a program first called Project SCANATE (scanning by coordinate), researchers at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, studied the remote-viewing talents of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, among others. Ingo went on to develop a successful, now highly respected remote-viewing training program for the Department of Defense. Pat Price died in 1975, but left a legacy as yet unequaled by any other publicly known remote viewer. In support of Project SCANATE, Pat was able to use his remote viewing talent to recover highly classified code-word information from an operational U.S. military facility. So good was Pat's remote viewing that he was recruited by and worked directly for the CIA until his reported death on July 14, 1975.
  
• 8/15/1977 Mae Brussell, on her radio program, discussed Jim Jones' Peoples Temple and suspected that it was some kind of government mind control program.
  
• 8/16/1977 Gerald Ford announced his support for the Panama Canal Treaties.
  
• 8/16/1977 Drs. Boswell and Humes appear in closed-door HSCA session.
  
• 8/19/1977 Philip C. Wehle, then Commanding officer of the military District of Washington, D. C., described JFK's head wound to the HSCA's Andy Purdy on 8-19-77. The declassified memo recorded that, "(Wehle) noticed a slight bruise over the right temple of the President but did not see any significant damage to any other part of the head. He noted that the wound was in the back of the head so he would not see it because the President was lying face up; he also said he did not see any damage to the top of the head, but said the President had a lot of hair which could have hidden that... ." No diagram from Wehle has surfaced. If the photographs depicting a skull defect antero-laterally are accurate, it is hard to imagine how such a defect would have been invisible to Wehle with JFK lying face up.
  
• 8/27/1977 William Lowther, Washington correspondent of the Daily Mail, writes and article which is headlined THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE BATHROOM. It says: Morgan Hall was a spy. He always kept a jug of martinis in the refrigerator. He had a two-way mirror in the bathroom. But Morgan's life was full of woe. His masters were slow in sending money. His assignment was awful sleazy. The code name for his project was "Operation Midnight Climax". It was meant to be a perpetual secret And no wonder. For two full years Morgan spent his working hours sitting on a portable toilet watching through his mirror drinking his martinis while a prostitute entertained men in the adjoining bedroom. Her job was to persuade clients to drink cocktails. What they didn't know was that the drinks had been mixed by the mysterious Morgan. They were more chemical than alcohol. Morgan had to record the results. We still don't know just what they were or how they worked. But some of the drinks gave instant headaches, others made you silly or drunk or forgetful or just plain frantic. The effects were only temporary and nobody was harmed, much. Morgan was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and it was America's top spy bosses who sent him out from headquarters near Washington to set up the "laboratory" in a luxury apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. Now, 1,647 pages of financial records dealing with the operation have been made public as part of a Congressional investigation. It was all part of the agency's MK-ULTRA mind control experimental program ... it was reasoned that a prostitute's clients wouldn't complain. The financial records released yesterday show that Morgan was always writing to headquarters. Says a typical letter - "Money urgently needed to pay September rent." His bills for the flat include Toulouse -Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can - can dancer and one marked: "Portable toilet for observation post." Says the CIA: "Morgan Hall died two years ago. We have no idea where he is buried."
  
• 8/28/1977 Britain's Sunday Telegraph carries an article which reads: Hospitals for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped have been instructed by the Health Department to collect statistics on operations being carried out to change personality. For the first time, ministers have acknowledged that there is growing concern. The operations, known as psycho surgery, are carried out to remove or destroy portions of brain tissue to change the behavior of severely depressed or exceptionally aggressive patients who do not respond to drugs or electric shock treatment. The Sunday Telegraph goes on to say that "the change was irreversible" and quotes a prominent consultant psychiatrist as saying: "My hospital is littered with the wrecks of humanity who have undergone psycho surgery." Dr. Randolph Crepson-White, talking with an independent television team reveals: "I performed five of these operations on people - four young men and one young woman - who appeared to be completely sane. There were two objects. The patients had to be completely de-sexed, to have their natural biological urges taken away, and they also had to have their individuality removed. They would, after being discharged, obey any order without question. In fact, they would virtually be thinking robots. I recognized that what I was doing was most unethical, and I did protest that very strongly, but I was told that the operations were vital to the security of the country. Nobody actually told me that those patients had been involved in espionage but that was the impression I was given. I was ordered to sign the Official Secrets form and that is why you must not mention my name - apart from the fact that I'm frightened, there'd be repercussions of a violent nature if certain people realized I'd been talking to you."
  
• 9/1977 The Ford Motor Company has long been fighting to keep unsafe cars on the road. Unfortunately, the payoff for their efforts has been substantial. The driving force behind the battle is, of course, profit. Ford, when rushed to put a subcompact car on the market, cut the preproduction time of the PINTO in half. There were already $200 million worth of tools in place on the PINTO assembly line when crash tests proved that the gas tank was extremely vulnerable to relatively low impact rear-end collisions. After eight years and more than five-hundred burn deaths, the design flaw was corrected. Ford's internal "cost benefit analysis," which placed a dollar value on human life (about $200,000 per person), said it wasn't profitable to make changes sooner. In 1978, the society of professional journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, honored Mother Jones for public service in magazine journalism in its publication of Mark Dowie's expose of "Hazards created by the gasoline tank mounting of the Ford Pintos." The article was hailed by Ralph Nader in Washington as "a story of corporate callousness at the highest level." However, when Mother Jones and Ralph Nader held major press conferences in 1977, there was a brief flurry of news about the Pinto problem which rapidly disappeared from the media. The fact that there are still about two million people in this country driving potentially fatal fire-trap vehicles (many of whom are unaware of the problem) qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "ten best censored stories of 1977." SOURCE: "Pinto Madness," by Mark Dowie, Mother Jones, September/October, 1977.
  
• 9/1/1977 Limited diplomatic ties re-established between US and Cuba.
  
• 9/2/1977 The Times gives front-page prominence to a report supplied from Honolulu by Reuter and UPI. It is headlined "PSYCHIATRISTS CONDEMN SOVIET UNION" and it says: "The general assembly of the World Psychiatric Association, meeting behind closed doors, has adopted a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for abusing psychiatry for "political purposes" in the Soviet Union..." The international code of ethics, called the "Declaration of Hawaii", adopted by the congress, follows years of criticism against the WPA for not taking action on ethical standards.
  
• 9/2/1977 This month, Robert Blakey sponsors a two-day "critics' conference." People like Paul Hoch, Peter Dale Scott, Mary Ferrell, Sylvia Meagher, and Gary Shaw are invited to speak to Blakey and other members of the staff.
  
• 9/5/1977 Pinochet arrived in the US for a state visit.
  
• 9/7/1977 Carter and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos Herrera sign treaties providing for the eventual return of the canal to Panama.
  
• 9/7/1977 Jack Anderson column: "The Pentagon, according to its former security chief, W. Donald Stewart, conducted at least 11 separate investigations of us, sparing no expense. The FBI secretly grabbed our telephone records, and the Internal Revenue Service conducted a penetrating year-long audit of my finances."
  
• 9/8/1977 Jack Anderson column: "Chile's shadowy secret police chief was the man behind the [Letelier] murder...Some Justice Department sources speculate that Chilean President Augusto Pinochet personally suggested the assassination."
  
• 9/9/1977 Kenneth O'Donnell, JFK's Appointments Secretary, dies today at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston after a brief "serious illness." The illness is never explained. [One biographical sketch suggests his death is alcohol related.] He is 53 yrs. old.
  
• 9/12/1977 South Africa: Steven Biko is killed while in police custody.
  
• 9/18/1977 public debate at the University of Southern California about the CIA involving Mark Lane, Daniel Ellsberg, John Gerassi (formerly of NY Times and Newsweek), William Colby, David Atlee Phillips and Ray Cline. Cline told Gerassi that the US intervention in the Dominican Republic wasn't important because it was "a lousy little country and always has been." According to Lane, after the debate, Cline personally threatened him. Lane pointed out to Phillips that according to Who's Who in America, Phillips had never worked for the CIA; it stated that 1958-61 he was a "proprietor...Public Relations, Havana, Cuba." Phillips declared that Oswald "was in no way connected with the CIA" and promised to call for the breakup of the Agency if it were proved guilty of a coverup in the Kennedy assassination. Lane soon had Phillips so rattled that he admitted, "when the record comes out, we will find that there was never a photograph taken of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City. We will find out that Lee Harvey Oswald never visited, let me put it, that is a categorical statement, there, there, we will find out there is no evidence, first of all there was no proof of that. Second, there is no evidence to show that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy." But he surmised that Oswald might have called the Soviet Embassy. Phillips said he regretted the CIA's attempts to discredit WC critics. (Plausible Denial 75-87)
  
• 9/22/1977 US-Cuba repatriation program (signed 8/29) begins as 29 Americans and 26 Cuban relatives arrive in Florida from Cuba.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1977 House vote gave the HSCA unrestricted subpoena power (New York Times 10/17/1977.)
  
• 10/3/1977 Jack Anderson column; he revealed that William Colby had made false statements in an effort to cover up crimes and prevent prosecution.
  
• 10/20/1977 Carl Bernstein's "The CIA and the Media" is published in Rolling Stone: "There is ample evidence that America's leading publishers allowed themselves and their news organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services...In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America's leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election...He went at the request of the CIA...Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs...In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations...Although the agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 (primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalists are still posted abroad...Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950's and 1960's with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism. Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Services. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc...the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors -- usually without pay -- in the national interest...Two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 1960's, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America -- Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of Miami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami's Cuban exile community." The CIA frequently used journalists to get into areas that would be difficult for agents to gain access to. Bernstein estimated that at least 400 journalists had maintained relationships with the CIA. William Colby was quoted as saying, "Let's not pick on some poor reporters. Let's go to the managements. They were witting."
  
• 10/31/1977 Richard Helms pleads "no contest" to charges that he failed to testify "fully, completely and accurately" before a Senate committee.
  
• 11/4/1977 Helms was sentenced to two years in jail (suspended) and fined $2000 after pleading nolo contendre to two misdemeanor counts. His plea was part of a bargain arranged by his attorney, Edward Bennett Williams. Had Helms not agreed to the plea, the Justice Dept was prepared to indict him on at least 8 counts of perjury.
  
• 11/9/1977 Former Asst FBI Director William Sullivan died in the early morning hours when he was mistaken for a deer in an open field in New Hampshire; a state policeman's son was the gunman. The 18-year-old claimed that he though he was shooting at a deer, even though his rifle had a telescopic sight; he was given a $500 fine and a ten-year suspension of his hunting license.
  
• 11/10/1977 It was announced that Pope Paul VI had ended the automatic excommunication imposed on divorced American Catholics who remarried. (The excommunication was first imposed by the Plenary Council of American Bishops in 1884.)
  
• 11/11/1977 a Royal decree has abolished film censorship in Spain.
  
• 11/16/1977 This UFO incident allegedly occurred at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota. About 7 miles south-west of Nisland, Dakota. The following is from a FOIA request. At 2059hrs., 16 Nov. 1977, Airmen 1C Phillips, Lt. A.Lims Security Control, telephone WSC. and reported an O2 alarm activation at L-9 and that Lims SAT #1, A-1C Jenkins & A-1C Raeke were dispatched, (Trip #62, ETA 2135hrs.) At 2147hrs., A-1C Phillips telephones WSC and reported that the situation at L-9 had been upgraded to a COVERED WAGON PER REQUEST OF Capt. Stokes, Larry D., FSO. Security Option 11 was initiated by WSC and Base CSC. BAF(Backup Security Force) #1&&2, were formed. At 2340hrs., 16 Nov. 77, the following information was learned: Upon arrival (2132hrs.) at Site #L-9. LSAT. Jenkins & Raeke, dismounted the SAT vehicle to make a check of the site fence line. At this time Raeke observed a bright light shinning vertically upwards from the rear of the fence line of L-9. ( There is a small hill approximately 50 yards behind L-9 ) Jenkins stayed with the SAT vehicle and Raeke proceeded to the source of the light to investigate. As Raeke approached the crest of the hill, he observed an individual dressed in a glowing green metallic uniform and wearing a helmet with visor. Raeke immediately challenged the individual, however the individual refused to stop and kept walking towards the rear fence line of L-9. Raeke aimed his M-16 rifle at the intruder and ordered him to stop. The intruder turned towards Raeke and aimed a object at Raeke which emitted a bright flash of intense light. The flash of light struck Raeke's M-16 rifle, disintegrating the weapon and causing second and third degree burns to Raeke's hands. Raeke immediately took cover and concealment and radioed the situation to Jenkins, who in turn radioed a 10-13 distress to Line Control. Jenkins responded to Raeke's position and carried Raeke back to the SAT vehicle. Jenkins then returned to the rear fence line to stand guard. Jenkins observed two intruders dressed in the same uniforms, walk through the rear fence line of L-9. Jenkins challenged the two individuals but they refused to stop. Jenkins aimed and fired two rounds from his M-16 rifle. One bullet struck one intruder in the back and one bullet struck one intruder in the helmet. Both intruders fell to the ground, however, approximately 15 seconds later Jenkins had to take cover from a bolt of light that missed him narrowly. The two intruders returned to the east side of the hill and disappeared. Jenkins followed the two and observed them go inside a saucer shaped object approximately 20' in diameter and 20'thick. The object emitted a glowing greenish light. Once the intruders were inside, the object climbed vertically upwards and disappeared over the Eastern horizon. BAF> #1 arrived at the site at 2230hrs., and set up a security perimeter. Site Survey Team arrived at the site (0120hrs.) and took radiation readings, which measured from 1.7 to 2.9 roentgens. Missile Maintenance examined the missiles and warheads and found the nuclear components missing from the warhead. Col. Speaker, Wing Cmdr. arrived at the site and set up an investigations. A completed follow-up report of this incident will be submitted by order of Col. Speaker. Raeke was later treated at the base hospital for second and third degree radiation burns to each hand. Raeke's M-16 rifle could not be located at the site.
  
• 11/16/1977 The film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released.
  
• 11/18/1977 Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime dies, at forty-five, of "inoperable cancer."
  
• 11/20/1977 Egypt's president Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset and proposed peace.
  
• USA FY 1977 deficit was $53.6 billion ($409.2 billion total spending). Defense spending was 25% of the budget. Inflation rate was 6.5%. National debt was $698 billion (interest paid: $42 billion).
  
• 12/1977 some parts of FBI agent Flynn's file on Jack Ruby were released; it showed Ruby as a PCI (potential criminal informant) who was contacted on matters concerning the interstate transportation of gambling devices, lottery tickets and pornography. (Ruby Cover-up 247-8)
  
• 12/1977 Los Angeles District Attorney's office conducts further reinvestigation of RFK assassination; results remained mostly secret until 1986.
  
• 12/1977 Infant formula manufacturers (Nestle and Bristol-Myers in the forefront; also Abbot and American Home Products) are pushing their products on the Third World in order to ensure their continued profit, since the birthrate in the United States is declining. They rely on exploitive and deceptive tactics to sell their products. Some of these include: giving free samples to mothers so their own milk will dry up, leaving them dependent upon the expensive formulas; enticement toward "modernization and heightened status" through use of the formulas, as encouraged by their well-financed media campaigns (which include radio and television spots, calendars, billboards, and baby contests); telling new mothers that their own milk is "inappropriate" or may be "unsuccessfully" given to their baby, etc. The majority of the Third World mothers wind up watering down the formulas, using contaminated water (in Chile, an investigation in 1973 revealed a bottle contamination rate of 80 percent), and otherwise malnourishing and infecting their children because they cannot afford to administer the formulas in the prescribed way. Parents would have to (and sometimes do) spend 30-40 percent of their average daily wage to feed their babies on this (almost always) unnecessary mother's milk substitute. Malnutrition and denial of natural immunities (which would have been provided had the mother breast-fed) caused by infant formula feeding account for 35,000 deaths and untold brain damage in babies of predominantly Third World countries. Meanwhile, the profit margins on infant formulas have been documented at as high as 72 percent. A billion dollars a year are taken from the Third World countries from the import of these formulas. Teaching, by U.S. and Swiss corporations, of the "repugnance and backwardness" of breast feeding is accounting for what has been termed "commerciogenic malnutrition" on a massive scale in Third World countries. The unethical and shocking impact of this practice makes this story a nominee for one of the "Ten Best Censored Stories of 1977." SOURCES: "The Bottle Baby Scandal -- Milking the Third World for All It's Worth," by Barbara Garson, Mother Jones magazine, December 1977, pp. 33-44+. "Into the Mouths of Babes," by Leah Margulies, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, Seven Days magazine, April 19, 1976, pp. 23-24.
  
• 12/1977 For years the satellite-spy-industry has flourished as a result of the "cold-war-fever" that plagued the United States and the Soviet Union: Extremely sensitive American and Soviet satellites have been orbiting the Earth with military objectives for years. Today a complex "civilian" spy network has nurtured with roots in the U.S. government structure and scientific community. The use of satellites, government bureaus and their corporate counterparts, are a far more efficient tool for resource exploitation and social control. The use of aerial photography and satellite imagery in the decision-making processes of local, state, and federal government is widespread. A spin-off from years of military development and space-age computerization, it is now apparent that individual collective privacy is being threatened from sources unseen. State governments usually use aerial photography and satellite imagery for road and highway planning as well as floodplain mapping. The infamous U-2 is being used in California for a variety of purposes. Local governments have used remote-sensing technology for tax assessment purposes and land ownership. Photos and images of the major cities have, and will, be used for such functions as allocation of police patrols, civil defense planning, and identification of housing conditions. Police use of satellites has been in practice for some time. Marijuana and opium fields have been located from space. Most popular with police agencies is the infrared sensing device, found commonly aboard American and Soviet satellites. These can be used to observe individuals through solid objects, like walls. Because we cannot see satellites passing overhead and aerial activity is not connected with government and corporate decisions, we, the citizenry, are unaware of the near-constant monitoring of our persons and property. There are no legal safeguards protecting us from possible abuses. Users of remote sensing technology satellite devices are protected from action taken against them by legal statutes; that is, there is no body of law which specifically defines courtroom statutes of remote sensing. Due to the lack of publicity and apparent public unawareness of this activity, this story is nominated as one of the "best censored stories of 1977." SOURCE: "Surveilling the Earth," by Don Jordan, Current, December, 1977, pp. 34-42.
  
• 12/7/1977 D. H. Byrd sells the Texas School Book Depository to the county for $40, 000.00.
  
• 12/20/1977 bombs are set off at two stores named Almacen El Espanol, one in Union City and the other in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Both had been sending medical supplies to Cuba. Omega 7 assumes responsibility.
  
• 12/25-27/1977 NYT, in response to embarrassing disclosures, ran a three-part series on the CIA and the media. It disclosed that at various times the Agency has "owned or subsidized" more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals, book publishers, etc., mostly overseas. These included the Rome Daily American, Bangkok Post, and Manila Times. "We had at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time," a CIA official told the Times.
  
• 12/25/1977 Begin visited Egypt. Begin refused to withdraw from the West Bank territories or give Palestinians self-rule; proposed a demilitarization of the Sinai.