Boise B Smith

[Drew Phipps]

Were those a series of rhetorical question? If not, which question did you want me to answer?

Speaking for myself, now, I feel better informed about a person I knew nothing about before (Boise Smith), with a solid connection to others that performed anomalous acts or behaved strangely on the date of the assassination. So in that sense, yes, Brian's posts here on this topic have favorably influenced the state of the research.

Speaking for myself, I find the discussion of the working and professional connections between people like Smith, Crichton and Westbrook to be of more value, than learning where people were born, who their third cousin is, and where they were buried. JMHO.

[Brian Castle]

This guy Smith is a real interesting character! Check this out - so first, from Oct 1942 to Dec 1943 he's up in the Aleutians with the 11th Air Force, dabbling in some kind of intelligence work (where he earned a citation from Gen Davenport Johnson - the mission was to get the Japanese off some islands in the area). Then, from Jan 1944 to Oct 1945 he's with the Ninth Army at SHAEF reporting to Col HF Osborne, in a G-5 Civil Affairs role (which had a lot to do with the protection and recovery of treasures and monuments, as much as the repatriation of people in-country). Smith's detachment was E1C2, which equates with "9th Army Military Government Center". In other words, he was stationed at HQ, where he somehow earned a Bronze Star.

THEN, on 23 Oct 1945 we have now-Major Smith reporting for duty with the Formosa Liaison Mission, reporting to Col Richard C Wittman.

The repatriates are returned to Japan from the entire China theater aboard 100 Japanese-manned American Liberty ships, 85 Navy LST's, and some 90 captured enemy vessels ranging from 100 to 5000 capacity. This repatriation fleet operates under the Shipping Control Authority for Japanese Merchant Marines or SCAJAP, and flies the diagonal red and green especially designed for the SCAJAP operations.


To date, the American field team under the direction of Colonel Richard C Wittman of 3322 40th St Lincoln Neb have assisted in the removal of all Japanese from Amoy, Swatow, Fort Bayord, Hainan Island, North French Indo-China, Canton, and Lao Yao. On the walls of his G-3 offices are maps showing the concentrations of Japanese along the coast and in the interior, their classifications, timetable schedules showing the arrival dates and ports of contact of each vessel engaged in this operation.


One of the most interesting phases of this operation occurs when the repatriates reach the staging areas. Rigid sanitary conditions are maintained by means of instructions furnished each group leader who is held responsible for their enforcement by the American medical men. In addition to these precautions each person is required to be vaccinated against smallpox and is given an initial typhus and cholera shot, with the subsequent series to be completed by the Army's follow-up system upon their arrival in Japan. As a further safeguard against the spread of communicable disease, the person of each repatriate and his baggage are thoroughly sprayed with DDF as they board the ship.


Prior to the arrival of the returnees at the ship staging areas, all persons are carefully screened so as to remove potential War Crimes suspects.

http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/58341354/

Col Smith is still doing repatriation work in China in early 1947, which may help explain some of the missing time till he shows up at the DPD again in 1950.

This is an amazing background for Civil Defense work, don't you think? First he's de-Nazifying Europe, then he's de-Japyifying China and Indo-China.... hey um... come to think of it... didn't Gen Edward Lansdale start getting involved in the Philippines right around this same time, or shortly thereafter?

Very interesting. So now Boise gets to de-commify Dallas, is that how it works? ROFL...

I found out something else interesting today. Lt Revill (who was also a member of Jack Crichton's 488th) almost came to blows with FBI Agent Hosty the morning before the assassination, because he made a derogatory comment about Kennedy and said, "I don't want to protect that sonofabyotch tomorrow". One has to wonder how many other members of the 488th felt the same way.

Anyway, now we know a little more about this fellow Boise B Smith. There is "very little" on the history of Civil Defense in Dallas, between the years of 1960 and 1964. There is the "work product" that you can see in the CD museum, but there's not much pertaining to how it got done. What's striking about Dallas is, it was one of eight federally designated "key cities", and while everyone else was building their Emergency Operation Centers under their City Halls, Dallas was building its Center "far away" from the downtown area, at the Fairgrounds underneath the Health and Science Museum.

[Peter Lemkin]

Welcome to the Form Brian. I also think you're doing fine and I see no reason for you to modify your style. Some here are advocates for their own brands of orthodoxy and/or style. What you've posted is interesting. Feel free to expand on it.

Jack Crichton I believe is pivotal in the events of 11/22/63 and I have long ago posted on him here...will try to locate it and link to it. I believe he was using Collins Radio [read CIA/NSA/MI top-secret encrypted] communications equipment to keep track of and coordinate key people active in the plot and cover-up. He did this through his 'Civil Defense' centers and wearing his Civil Defense 'hat'. It is my belief that Collins Radio also made the communications equipment the actual in-plaza and around-the-plaza operatives and spotters were using; ditto the communications equipment used on AF-1 and AF-2 that day to connect to the WH and other locations. If your man Smith was Crichton's right hand, it is likely he also played some role or had some knowledge of events of that day. Interesting that he is an unknown entity and little investigated - certainly not officially.

I don't believe Crichton went back to the Adolphus, nor likely came from it. He was in his underground communications bunker[s] that day during the important events. IMHO.

Related [from an article by P.D. Scott

http://www.voltairenet.org/article187504.html]:

In the case of the JFK assassination, I wish to focus on two men who functioned as part of the communications network of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP), the agency renamed in 1968 as the Office of Emergency Preparedness (to which McCord was attached), and renamed again in 1982 as the National Program Office (for which Oliver North was the action officer). [11]
These two men (there are others) are Winston Lawson, the Secret Service advance man who from the lead car of the motorcade was in charge of the Secret Service radio channels operating in the motorcade; and Jack Crichton, the army intelligence reserve officer who with Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin selected the Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald's first (and falsified) FBI interview. [12]
Lawson has drawn the critical attention of JFK researchers, both for dubious actions he took before and during the assassination, and also for false statements he made after it (some of them under oath). For example, Lawson reported after the assassination that motorcycles were deployed on "the right and left flanks of the President's car" (17 WH 605). On the morning of November 22, however, the orders had been changed (3 WH 244), so that the motorcycles rode instead, as Lawson himself testified to the Warren Commission, "just back of the President's car" (4 WH 338; cf. 21 WH 768-70). Captain Lawrence of the Dallas Police testified that that the proposed side escorts were redeployed to the rear on Lawson's own instructions (7 WH 580-81; cf. 18 WH 809, 21 WH 571). This would appear to have left the President more vulnerable to a possible crossfire.
Early on November 22, at Love Field, Lawson installed, in what would become the lead car, the base radio whose frequencies were used by all Secret Service agents on the motorcade. This radio channel, operated by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), was used for some key decisions before and after the assassination, yet its records, unlike those of the Dallas Police Department (DPD) Channels One and Two, were never made available to the Warren Commission, or any subsequent investigation. The tape was not withheld because it was irrelevant; on the contrary, it contained very significant information.
The WHCA actually reports to this day on its website that the agency was "a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy." [13] However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, or why it was not made available to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). [14] It should have been.
For one thing, the WHCA tape, as Vincent Palamara has written, contains the "key" to the unresolved mystery of who, after the shooting, redirected the motorcade to Parkland hospital. The significance of this apparently straightforward command, about which there was much conflicting testimony, is heightened when we read repeated orders on the Dallas Police radio transcript to "cut all traffic for the ambulance going to Parkland code 3" (17 WH 395) the ambulance in question having nothing to do with the president (whose shooting had not yet been announced on the DPD radio). In fact the ambulance had been dispatched about ten minutes before the assassination to pick someone from in front of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), who was wrongly suspected of having suffered an epileptic seizure. [15]
Lawson later reported to the Secret Service that he heard on his radio "that we should proceed to the nearest hospital." He wrote also that he "requested Chief Curry to have the hospital contacted," and then that "Our Lead Car assisted the motorcycles in escorting the President's vehicle to Parkland Hospital" (17 WH 632), cf. 21 WH 580). [16] In other words, after hearing something on the WHCA radio, Lawson helped ensure that the President's limousine would follow the route already set up by the motorcycles for the epileptic. (In his very detailed Warren Commission testimony, Lawson said nothing about the route having already been cleared. On the contrary he testified that "we had to do some stopping of cars and holding our hands out the windows and blowing the sirens and horns to get through" (4 WH 354).
The WHCA radio channel used by Lawson and others communicated almost directly to the WHCA base at Mount Weather in Virginia, the base facility of the COG network. From there, Secret Service communications were relayed to the White House, via the batteries of communications equipment connecting Mount Weather with the White House and "Raven Rock" the underground Pentagon sixty miles north of Washington as well as with almost every US military unit stationed around the globe. [17]
Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was also part of this Mount Weather COG network. This was in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, "Because it was intended for continuity of government' operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment." [18] In retrospect the Civil Defense Program is remembered derisively, for having advised schoolchildren, in the event of an atomic attack, to hide their heads under their desks. [19] But in 1963 civil defense was one of the urgent responsibilities assigned to the Office of Emergency Planning, which is why Crichton, as much as Secret Service agent Lawson, could be in direct touch with the OEP's emergency communications network at Mount Weather.
Jack Crichton is of interest because he, along with DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit, was responsible for choosing a Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald from the right-wing Russian community. This man was Ilya Mamantov, who translated for Marina Oswald at her first DPD interview on November 22. What she allegedly said in Russian at this interview was later used to bolster what I have called the "phase one" story, still promoted from some CIA sources, that Russia and/or Cuba were behind the assassination.
As summarized by the FBI, Mamantov's account of Marina's Russian testimony was as follows:
MARINA OSWALD advised that LEE HARVEY OSWALD owned a rifle which he used in Russia about two years ago. She observed what she presumed to be the same rifle in a blanket in the garage at [Ruth Paine's residence]…. MARINA OSWALD stated that on November 22, she had been shown a rifle in the Dallas Police Department…. She stated that it was a dark color like the one that she had seen, but she did not recall the sight. [20]
These specific details that Marina said she had seen a rifle that was dark and scopeless were confirmed in an affidavit (signed by Marina and Mamantov, 24 WH 219) that was taken by DPD officer B.L. Senkel (24 WH 249). They were confirmed again by Ruth Paine, who witnessed the Mamantov interview, (3 WH 82). They were confirmed again the next night in an interview of Marina by the Secret Service, translated by Mamantov's close friend Peter Gregory. But a Secret Service transcript of the interview reveals that the source of these details was Gregory, not Marina:
(Q) This gun, was it a rifle or a pistol or just what kind of a gun? Can she answer that?
(A) It was a gun
Mr. Gregory asked: Can you describe it?
NOTE: Subject said: I cannot describe it because a rifle to me like all rifles.
Gregory translation: She said she cannot describe it. It was sort of a dark rifle just like any other common rifle…
Subject in Russian: It was a hump (or elevation) but I never saw through the scope….
Gregory translation: She says there was an elevation on the rifle but there was no scope no telescope. [21]
We have to conclude not just that Gregory had falsified Marina's testimony ("a rifle to me like all rifles"); but so probably had his friend Mamantov, who later testified no less than seven times to the Warren Commission that Marina had used the word "dark" to describe the gun. There were others in Dallas who claimed that Oswald's gun indeed had been scopeless, until Oswald had a scope installed on it by Dallas gunsmith Dial Ryder. The Warren Report elaborately refuted this corroborated claim, and concluded that "the authenticity of the repair tag" used to support it was "subject to grave doubts." (WR 317).
We can see here, what the Warren Commission did not wish to see, signs of a conspiracy to misrepresent Marina's testimony, and possibly to link Oswald's gun to a dark and scopeless rifle he had in the Soviet Union. Our concerns that Mamantov misrepresented her lead us to concerns about why two Army Intelligence Reserve officers from the 488th unit (Jack Crichton and Deputy DPD Chief George Lumpkin) selected Mamantov as her interpreter. Our concerns are increased when we see that B.L. Senkel, the DPD officer who took Marina's suspect affidavit, was the partner of F.P. Turner, who collected the dubious rifle repair tag (24 WH 328), and that both men spent most of November 22 with DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin. For example, they were with Lumpkin in the pilot car of the motorcade when Lumpkin was communicating with Winston Lawson in the lead car behind them.
I conclude that when we look at the conduct of the two men we know to have been parts of the COG emergency communications network in Dallas, we see patterns of sinister behavior that also involved others, or what we may call conspiratorial behavior. These concatenated efforts to implicate Oswald in a phase-one conspiracy narrative lead me to propose a hypothesis for which I have neither evidence nor an alternative explanation: namely, that someone on the WHCA network may have been the source for the important unexplained description on the Dallas Police tapes of a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight (5 feet 10 inches, 165 pounds) recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.
08Note that there are no other known sources ascribing this specific height and weight to Oswald. For example, when he was arrested and charged in Dallas that same day, Oswald was recorded as having a height of 5'9 ½ inches, and a weight of 131 pounds. [22] The first reference to Oswald as 5'10", 165 pounds, was that offered by Oswald's mother Marguerite to FBI Agent Fain in May 1960, when Oswald himself was absent in Russia. [23]
The DPD officer contributing the description on the Police Channel was Inspector Herbert Sawyer, who allegedly had heard it from someone outside the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) whom he could not identify or describe. [24] The Warren Report said categorically that his source was Howard Brennan (WR 5), and that on the evening of November 22, Brennan "identified Oswald as the person in the lineup who bore the closest resemblance to the man in the window but he said that he was unable to make a positive identification" (WR 145). But there are many reasons to doubt this, starting with conflicts in Brennan's own testimony (as Anthony Summers reported in Conspiracy, pp. 109-10) . And Ian Griggs has made a strong case that Brennan never saw Oswald in a line-up that evening. (There are police records placing Oswald in three line-ups that day, and corroborating witness reports of them; but there is no evidence whatever that Brennan attended any of the three.) [25]
There is another strong reason to doubt that the source was Brennan. Brennan testified later to the Warren Commission that he saw his suspect in a window of the Texas School Book Depository, "standing up and leaning against the left window sill." Pressed to describe how much of the suspect he saw, Brennan answered, "I could see probably his whole body, from his hips up. But at the time that he was firing the gun, a possibility from his belt up" (3 WH 144).
The awkwardness of Brennan's language draws attention to the fundamental problem about the description. It is hard to imagine anyone giving a full height and weight estimate from seeing someone who was only partially visible in a window. So there are intrinsic grounds for believing the description must have come from another source. And when we see that the same description is found in Oswald's FBI and CIA files and nowhere else there are reasons to suspect the source was from government secret files.
We have seen that there was interaction in Dallas between the WHCA and DPD radio channels, thanks to the WHCA portable radio that Lawson had installed in the lead car of the presidential motorcade. [26] This radio in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying Dallas Police Department (DPD) Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit. [27] At the same time, as noted above, it was in contact with the COG nerve center at Mount Weather, Virginia. And Mount Weather had the requisite secret communications to receive information from classified intelligence files, without other parts of the government being alerted.
Permit me at this moment an instructive digression. It is by now well established that Kennedy in 1963 was concerned enough by "the threat of far-right treason" that he urgently persuaded Hollywood director John Frankenheimer "to turn [the novel] Seven Days in May into a movie." [28] In this book, a charismatic superior officer, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, intend[s] to stage a coup d'état …. According to the plan, an undisclosed Army combat unit known as ECOMCON (Emergency COMmunications CONtrol) will seize control of the country's telephone, radio, and television networks, while the conspiracy directs the military and its allies in Congress and the media from "Mount Thunder" (a continuity of government base based on Mount Weather).
It is no secret also that in 1963 Kennedy had aroused major right-wing dissatisfaction, largely because of signs of his increasing rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The plot of the book and movie reflects the concern of liberals at the time about generals like General Edwin Walker, who had resigned in 1961 after Kennedy criticized his political activities in the Army. (Walker had given his troops John Birch Society literature, along with the names of right-wing candidates to vote for.) [29] We can assume however that Kennedy had no firm evidence of a Mount Weather conspiracy: if he had, it is unlikely his response would have just been to sponsor a fictionalized movie.
It is important at this stage to point out that, although COG elements like Mount Weather were considered part of the Pentagon, the COG "government in waiting" was at no time under military control.

p. 276 The Plot and the Coverup Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by PDS

...two minutes earlier by Jack Alston Crichton, a right-wing Republican, oil operator, member of Army Intelligence Reserve (9 WH 106), and head of "a local Army Intelligence Unit" (WCD 386, SS 1058). Crichton knew Mamantov personally as a fellow petroleum geologist. He also knew him because Mamantov was a precinct chairman o the Republican party, for which Crichton became the 1964 candidate for governor of Texas.

It is not known how many Dallas policemen were also (as is apparently a widespread practice) members of the U.S. Army Reserve. One such reservist was Detective Adamik (7 WH 203), a member of the party which retrieved the rifle-blanket from the Paine garage and later reported what he overheard at Mamantov's interview of Marina about the rifle ("She said that it looked like her husband's rifle. She said that it was dark"; 24 WH291). Another member of Army Intelligence Reserve was Captain W. P. Gannaway, Revill's supervisor as head of the Dallas Police Special Service Bureau (WCD 1426.26; 19 WH 120); Gannaway's secretary was reported by an out-of-town police chief to be "closely connected" to Jack Ruby (WCD 86.151). This story was plausible, given the close connection between Ruby and the SSB, including men who participated in the search of the TSBD and the arrest of Oswald. Since the protection of visiting dignitaries was one of the SSB's responsibilities (5 WH48), Gannaway was involved in the meetings arranged by Secret Service advance man Winston Lawson for the Kennedy visit (5 WH39; 7 WH 580).

According to a news story in FBI files, in 1963 both Captain Gannaway and his subordinate Lieutenant Revill were assigned a special responsibility for "espionage and subversive activities" in Dallas. This was in conjunction with

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, military intelligence teams from the army, navy, and air force, and other federal agencies with investigators operating from headquarters here…The job of [Revill's] intelligence section in Capt. Gannaway's bureau…requires the closest cooperation with these other governmental agencies gathering intelligence on subversive groups suspected of espionage…With membership in a national police intelligence organization known as LEIU (Law Enforcement Intelligence Units) the local officers are able to get information almost immediately on suspected subversives when they move into Dallas. This information is exchanged by police units as these persons move from city to city…Employes in [industrial] plants are carefully screened by security conscious personnel officers, and in key jobs are given strict government security clearances. Industry is taking great strides to upgrade security practices. One such group in this area is the American Society for Industrial Security. 10

The possibility that Oswald was an informant for this centralized security team would explain his visit to the Dallas American Civil Liberties Union, a liberal group being investigated by Revill's intelligence section, in the company of an extreme right-winger (Michael Paine). 11.

One can see how easily a false legend for Oswald could have been generated in the shared files of this coordinated security campaign, involving the Dallas SSB, FBI, military intelligence, and the American Society for Industrial Security. Such a centralized file system could be the source for the recurring (and unexplained) inversion of Oswald's name, as Harvey Lee Oswald, in the files of the Dallas police (e.g., 19 WH 438, 24 WH 259), FBI (e.g., 23 WH 207, 23 WH 373), Secret Service (16 WH 721, 748), army intelligence, and navy intelligence. 12.

The most intriguing "Harvey Lee Oswald" document is Jack Revill's list of employees at the Texas School Book Depository, compiled right after the assassination, before Oswald had been apprehended for the Tippit murder. For some unexplained reason, Oswald's inverted name ("Harvey Lee Oswald") was at the very head of that list, accompanied by an address, "605 Elsbeth," that slightly misrepresented the address (602 Elsbeth) where he had resided a year earlier (24 WH 259). 13 The Elsbeth address does suggest that Oswald's data had been parked for some time before the assassination in an intelligence file, not hitherto identified. One possibility would be the files of the LEIU, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, the intercity police-intelligence organization of which Revill as the lead local representative. LEIU's files, unlike ordinary police files, cannot be given to any civilian authorities and are treated as exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. As we shall see, it was also a frequent practice for the LEIU member intelligence units to collaborate with army intelligence. 14.

Another army reserve officer in Dealey plaza may have been Winston Lawson, the White House Secret Service agent responsible for the choice of the Kennedy motorcade route (4 WH 318). Lawson's first three reports of what happened on and before November 22 raise considerable questions about his performance……

From Bush and the JFK Hit, part 10 by Russ Baker http://whowhatwhy.org/2013/11/20/bush-an...r-camelot/Jack Crichton, Stage Manager
If Poppy Bush was busy on November 22, 1963, so was his friend Jack Crichton. Bush's fellow GOP candidate was a key figure in a web of military intelligence figures with deep connections to the Dallas Police Department and as previously noted, to the pilot car of JFK's motorcade.
Crichton came back into the picture within hours of Kennedy's death and the subsequent arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, when a peculiar cordon sanitaire went up around Marina Oswald. The first to her side was Republican activist and precinct chairman Ilya Mamantov, a vociferous anti-Communist who frequently lectured in Dallas on the dangers of the Red menace.
When investigators arrived, Mamantov stepped up as interpreter and embellished Marina's comments to establish in no uncertain terms that the "leftist" Lee Harvey Oswald had been the gunman the lone gunman who killed the president.
It is interesting of course that the Dallas police would let an outsider in particular, a right-wing Russian émigré handle the delicate interpreting task. Asked by the Warren Commission how this happened, Mamantov said that he had received a phone call from Deputy Police Chief George Lumpkin. After a moment's thought, Mamantov then remembered that just preceding Lumpkin's call he had heard from Jack Crichton.
It was Crichton who had put the Dallas Police Department together with Mamantov and ensured his place at Marina Oswald's side at this crucial moment.
Despite this revelation, Crichton almost completely escaped scrutiny. The Warren Commission never interviewed him. Yet, as much as anyone, Crichton embodied a confluence of interests within the oil-intelligence-military nexus. And he was closely connected to Poppy in their mutual efforts to advance the then-small Texas Republican Party, culminating in their acceptance of the two top positions on the state's Republican ticket in 1964.
Jack Crichton

During World War II, Crichton had served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. Postwar, he began working for the company of petroleum czar Everette DeGolyer and was soon connected in petromilitary circles at the highest levels. A review of hundreds of corporate documents and newspaper articles shows that when Crichton left DeGolyer's firm in the early fifties he became involved in an almost incomprehensible web of companies with overlapping boards and ties to DeGolyer. Many of them were backed by some of North America's most powerful families, including the Du Ponts of Delaware and the Bronfmans, owners of the liquor giant Seagram.
Crichton was so plugged into the Dallas power structure that one of his company directors was Clint Murchison Sr., king of the oil depletion allowance, and another was D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building.


A typical example of this corporate cronyism came in 1952, when Crichton was part of a syndicate including Murchison, DeGolyer, and the Du Ponts that used connections in the fascist Franco regime to acquire rare drilling rights in Spain. The operation was handled by Delta Drilling, which was owned by Joe Zeppa of Tyler, Texas the man who transported Poppy Bush from Tyler to Dallas on November 22, 1963.
It was in 1956 that the bayou-bred Crichton started up his own spy unit, the 488[SUP]th[/SUP] Military Intelligence Detachment. He would serve as the intelligence unit's only commander through November 22, 1963, continuing until he retired from the 488[SUP]th[/SUP] in 1967, at which time he was awarded the Legion of Merit and cited for "exceptionally outstanding service."
Gimme Shelter
Besides his oil work and his spy work, the disarmingly folksy Crichton wore a third hat. He was an early and central figure in an important Dallas institution that is virtually forgotten today: the city's Civil Defense organization. Launched in the early 1950s as cold war hysteria grew, it was a centerpiece of a kind of officially sanctioned panic response that, like the response to September 11, 2001, had a potential to serve other agendas.
So avid and extensive was the Dallas civil defense effort that the conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey singled it out for special praise in his syndicated column in September 1960: "The Communists, since 1917, have sold Communism to more people than have been told about Christ after 2,000 years," Harvey wrote, a sentiment common in rightist circles of the era.
But they got their converts one at a time. You and I can convert' two others to become militant Americans this week . . . That's precisely the nature of the counterattack that has been mounted in Dallas.
Early in 1961, Crichton was the moving force behind a cold war readiness program called "Know Your Enemy," which focused on the Communist intention to destroy the American way of life. In October 1961, Dallas mayor Earle Cabell introduced a short documentary Communist Encirclement 1961. Afterward, the Dallas Morning News wrote that the Channel 8 switchboard was "flooded . . . with calls from viewers lauding the program, which deals frankly with Communist infiltration."
So great was the sense of alarm that at the 1961 Texas State Fair in Dallas, 350 people per hour made their way through an exhibitor's bomb shelter.
In April 1, 1962, Dallas Civil Defense, with Crichton heading its intelligence component, opened an elaborate underground command post under the patio of the Dallas Health and Science Museum. Because it was intended for "continuity-of-government" operations during an attack, it was fully equipped with communications equipment.
With this shelter in operation on November 22, 1963, it was possible for someone based there to communicate with police and other emergency services. There is no indication that the Warren Commission or any other investigative body or even JFK assassination researchers looked into this facility or the police and Army Intelligence figures associated with it.
On November 22, Crichton suggested Mamantov to the police department as the ideal person to interpret for Marina. His basis for knowing this was that in his role in military intelligence he maintained surveillance of Russians in Dallas, working closely in this regard with the police department.
Marina's statements through Mamantov would play a crucial role in starting a chain of events that could have led to a U.S. missile strike on Cuba. In the hours following Kennedy's assassination, the Dallas Police Department passed along information purportedly gleaned from Marina Oswald that suggested possible ties between her husband and the government of Cuba.
Though the information would turn out to be wrong, it was quickly passed to Army Intelligence, which then passed it along to the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the unit that would have directed an attack on the island had someone ordered it in those chaotic first hours after Kennedy's death. That this sequence of events took place is confirmed by the original Army cable from military intelligence in Texas, declassified a decade later. What is not clear is how close matters ever got to zero hour.
A key element in this tangled tale is the little-appreciated overlap between the Dallas Police Department and Army Intelligence. As Crichton, who has since died, would reveal in a little-noted oral history in 2001, there were "about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department."
Thus Crichton was a crucial figure linking many seemingly disparate elements: military intelligence, local police, the GOP, the White Russians, the oil community, George de Mohrenschildt, and Poppy Bush.


The Poppy and Jack Show
In the fall of 1963, about two months before JFK's assassination, the two political neophytes Jack Crichton and George H.W. Bush both decided to mount GOP races for statewide office. The following year, they would head the Texas GOP's ticket, with Crichton the nominee for governor and Bush for U.S. Senate. Both used the same lawyer, Pat Holloway, who worked out of the Republic National Bank Building.
The man who recruited them as candidates, state GOP chairman Peter O'Donnell, would several years later be forced by newspaper revelations to admit that his family foundation was a conduit for CIA funds.
Thus in November 1963, Bush and Crichton were essentially working in tandem. Given that alliance, Poppy would need to explain not only where he was on November 22 and why he tried so hard to hide that, but also what he knew about Crichton's activities that day and about Crichton's Army Intelligence colleagues in the pilot car of the motorcade.
In his oral history, Crichton couches his relationship with Bush in benign and casual terms. He says that he and Poppy "spoke from the same podiums and got to be fairly good acquaintances." Their appearances on behalf of the Texas Republican Party evolved into a private friendship that continued over the years. "When he was head of the CIA, I called him one day and I said, George, I'm coming to Washington, would you have time to play tennis?' And he said Yeah.' He said, 'How would you like to play at The White House?' And I said Man, that'd be a real deal.' So he said, Well, I'll have you a partner.'

[Brian Castle]

In April 1, 1962, Dallas Civil Defense, with Crichton heading its intelligence component, opened an elaborate underground command post under the patio of the Dallas Health and Science Museum. Because it was intended for "continuity-of-government" operations during an attack, it was fully equipped with communications equipment.

Hi Peter, this ^^^ is an example of the logic I'm trying to expand.

Dallas was one of eight federally designated "key cities". While everyone else was building their Emergency Operations Centers directly underneath their City Halls, Dallas and the other "key cities" were building theirs away from the metropolitan areas. These eight cities were structured differently from the others. There's not a lot of information on this, in fact if you look at the National Archives there's a curious gap in the "Office of Civil Defense" during the years 1961-1964.

The "continuity-of-government" operations in the key cities were necessarily more complex than the others, for the simple reason that the mayor and city government could not simply be moved downstairs - or if they were, there had to be communications in place for any kind of government to continue. The primary purpose of the communications in the EOC was therefore disaster management, and as a secondary consideration in the key cities there was special infrastructure for COG.

There was something called DISC, which later morphed into NISP, which defined the portion of the industrial base that was "almost as important as government". For instance there are corporate CEO's on the list of people to be transported to Mount Weather in the event of a national emergency. And, there are local executives on the list in Dallas. But Dallas contained at the time over half of the nation's oil executives and almost all of its explorers, and a heavy concentration of the people who actually knew how to build wells and equip them. The 488th when it started was called the "Strategic" Intelligence "Detachment", and its purpose was international petroleum research. Gradually during the Civil Defense period you mentioned (1960-1962) its interest changed from petroleum to subversives, and its title changed to "Military Intelligence".

I'm pretty sure there was special infrastructure in place in Dallas, to support COG. There had to be, because the setup of the shelters was different. The plan wasn't to get the Mayor and Police Chief to the fair grounds, it was to get them somewhere they could talk to the fairgrounds. In other words, the setup was being run by the military, not by the civilians. The military was the one mapping and planning the shelters, and it's interesting in that regard that as Director of the Dallas City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission, Boise B Smith had no staff! If you look at the archives of other cities, there is detailed information on how the CD decisions were made and who made them, but for Dallas.... nothing. Not even in the newspapers. The whole thing was kept tightly under wraps.

[David Josephs]

Excellent line of research Brian - thanks for your efforts here.

The coordination of the "FIRE" command so that many shots can sound like one, the connections to Collins Radio, the communications devices seen in Dealey Plaza, The Secret Service Communications center at the Sheraton with DPD coming and going as well as the rest of the personal connections that Tom finds (and I find that Tom's work is fantastic, detailed and uncovers the relationships which existed that are very pertinent to the case)



From Byrds, Planes, and an Automobile
http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back...bler3.html

Another appreciative friend of Byrd's was Arthur Andrew Collins, the founder of the Collins Radio Company. Byrd, along with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a financier of his cousin Admiral Richard E. Byrd's polar expeditions by air. A mountain range at the South Pole is named the Harold Byrd Mountains in his honor.[SUP]335[/SUP] Some of that money went for the purchase of radio equipment and technical support from Arthur Collins. The 1933 expedition was the first big break for the young Collins Radio Company of Cedar Rapids Iowa.[SUP]336[/SUP]
In May 1951 Collins began an expansion program to build a one-million dollar plant near the Dallas suburb of Richardson. A hanger was leased at nearby Red Bird Airport to install and repair airborne equipment. The move was due to a decentralization plan urged by the Defense Department for security reasons.[SUP]337[/SUP]


Without Galloway's protection at Bethesda, none of the cover-up works. Also at Bethesda is Kinney - surgeon General of the Navy, Burkeley and LeMay.

Nice work on Boise.