Reclaiming History (243 page)

The CIA memos between the CIA station in Mexico City and CIA headquarters, where the staff is trying to figure out who Oswald is and what he looked like, by themselves show that Oswald obviously had no connection with the CIA. These weren’t memos by the CIA to the outside world, but
internal
memos, that is,
within
the CIA. When Charlotte Bustos, who sent out the aforementioned memo and another on the next day, was asked in her testimony before the HSCA, “Do you have any reason to believe that Oswald had any type of relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency?” she responded, “No, none whatsoever.” “When you had access to Oswald’s 201 file you saw no indication in there that he had any type of relationship with the Agency as an agent, source, asset, et cetera?” “No, none whatsoever. There certainly would not have gone out all this cable traffic if anybody along the way had known he was an asset. You would not have gone out with [name] traces and things.” “If he was an agent would you have notified the Mexico City station?” “Yes.” “Would that normally be done as a matter of standard operating procedure?” “Yes. Then somebody would be very upset that [there] was an agent in Mexico without telling the [Mexico City] Chief of Station because the Chief of Station is responsible for all operational activities in his area.”
¹⁷⁹

The person described as Oswald in the Mexico City memos (his identity to this day is not known) is shown in a photo in the photo section of this book.
¹⁸⁰
As can be seen, he bears no resemblance to Oswald in face or physique.
*
Yet unbelievably, even though someone attempting to impersonate Oswald would have to bear at least some resemblance to him, several conspiracy theorists aren’t willing to accept the matter as a simple case of mistaken identity. Anthony Summers, in his book
Conspiracy
, smells a CIA cover-up: “The CIA did not reveal [to the Warren Commission that the man] had also been at the Soviet Embassy on October 1, the date of an ‘Oswald’ contact with the Soviets.” He goes on ominously: “Who was this mystery man, anyway?”
¹⁸¹
John Davis, in his book
Mafia Kingfish
, and Jim Garrison, in
On the Trail of the Assassins
, also suggest the man in the photo was impersonating Oswald.
¹⁸²
†
Peter Dale Scott, after writing that the man in the CIA photos is “heavyset, balding, and middle-aged,” nonetheless remarkably goes on to agree with most of the critics that the man was not Oswald but an imposter.
¹⁸³
The conspiracy theorists are so unhinged that they believe Oswald’s framers would use an impersonator who looks as much like Oswald as Danny DeVito does.

The allegation that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City is completely devoid of merit. The Warren Report concluded that it was Oswald, not an imposter, in Mexico City.
¹⁸⁴
Likewise, the HSCA, though acknowledging that there were “unanswered questions” about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, said that “the weight of the evidence supported the conclusion that Oswald was the individual who visited the Soviet Embassy and Cuban Consulate.”
¹⁸⁵

T
he Second Oswald allegation, like virtually all the allegations by the conspiracy theorists, is ludicrous on its face and goes nowhere. As the Associated Press reported from a review of FBI records in December of 1977, “When Oswald was identified as the suspect and his picture was flashed around the world, people from one end of the country to the other called their local FBI office to report seeing Oswald in their neighborhood in the preceding weeks.”
¹⁸⁶
This phenomenon would particularly pertain to someone like Oswald, whose features were so common. Even when someone is dead, like Elvis Presley, people continue to swear they’ve seen him. (“I have seen Elvis in the supermarket. Once he gave me a wink as if to say, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ Several people in Kalamazoo know where Elvis lives, but they respect his privacy and are protecting him from the media,” wrote someone to Ann Landers.)
¹⁸⁷
*
Take the case of someone who, to put it indelicately, looks like no one else: Michael Jackson. When Jackson, amid allegations of child molestation, called off the remainder of a tour in November of 1993 and went into hiding, “Jackson sightings were reported around the world. A Jackson look-alike stirred paparazzi in London, a hotel operator in the French Alps announced that the singer was staying at his resort, and a local newspaper in Connecticut quoted an ‘impeccable source’ who said Jackson was recovering at a nearby drug treatment center. All these reports were false.”
¹⁸⁸

Conspiracy theorists are well aware of this syndrome; yet, starving for any morsel at all that will feed their obsession, they have seized on almost every one of the Oswald sightings, virtually all of which, even if true, don’t intelligently advance any argument, much less a conspiratorial one.

There have been so many preposterous theories about the Kennedy assassination that it’s hard to say which one is the most far-out. One theory that perhaps “takes the cake” is set forth by conspiracy author David Lifton in his book
Best Evidence
. The theory is so unhinged that it really doesn’t deserve one word in any serious treatment of the assassination. The only problem is that it comes wrapped in a hefty 747-page book, which was published in 1980 by a prominent publisher (Macmillan), was treated seriously by many people who should know better, got excellent reviews in several major newspapers, was a Book of the Month Club selection, and was on the
New York Times
best-seller list for three months, rising as high as number four. Therefore, I am forced to devote some time to talking about nonsense of the most exquisite nature.

At the time of the assassination, Lifton, age twenty-four, was attending UCLA to get an advanced degree in engineering. To support himself he worked nights as a computer engineer at North American Aviation. What set him off on what would become a lifetime obsession,
*
causing him to eventually quit school and his job and borrow money from his parents so he could pursue shadows of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, was a Mark Lane lecture he attended in Los Angeles in 1964.
¹
Before he left UCLA in 1966, he sat in on a course on the Warren Commission taught by former Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler. The law professor and Lifton became friendly adversaries, but when Liebeler learned that Lifton actually intended to write a book on the theory he had come up with, he told Lifton, “I don’t think that anybody will ever believe anything you say.”
²
Liebeler was wrong. Many have. The good professor failed to take into account that reason only visits those who welcome it.

Lifton is a confirmed grassy knoll devotee. He believes the deadly shots came from there as opposed to the Book Depository Building, where Oswald was. But the conspirators, to frame Oswald, somehow got a hold of the president’s body, per Lifton, between the time it was at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the time it arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy, spirited it away to a place where the bullet wounds to the president were altered to make it look like the shots came from the rear (where Oswald was, not the right front, where the triggerman for the conspirators supposedly was), and then returned the body to the presidential party, all without anyone having any inkling of what had taken place. No self-respecting author of suspense novels would be bold enough to float a theory like this. But then again, Lifton would probably say, this isn’t fiction, it’s real.
*

More specifically, knowing that bullet entry wounds are smaller than exit wounds, Lifton says the plotters enlarged the wound in the throat (ignoring the fact that the tracheotomy at Parkland had already done that) and the wound to the right side of the president’s head to make them look like exit wounds, when they were really, per Lifton, entry wounds. Believing that the two bullets that he says entered the president’s body from the front did not exit his body, and believing further that the president was not shot from the rear, Lifton said the back side of the president originally had no wounds of any kind. So the plotters, he said, “created” two “false…entry” wounds to the rear of the president, one in his upper right back and one in his upper right head to make it look as if Kennedy was shot from the rear. Lifton doesn’t say if the plotters fired two rounds into the president’s corpse or created the two holes some other way.
³
But if they “created” the two wounds in some other way, he doesn’t say how the three autopsy surgeons and every other pathologist, including the nine forensic pathologists on the HSCA medical panel, all concluded that the two wounds to the back side of the president were caused by
bullets
.

Lifton believes that only the plotters know what type of rifle and bullets were used to kill Kennedy, because when the conspirators had possession of Kennedy’s body, they removed the real bullets that killed him so they would never reach the FBI lab. What about the fragments of one bullet found inside the presidential limousine, and the whole bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital, each of which was determined to have been fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle? Per Lifton, the plotters planted them there. But how did the plotters come into possession of Oswald’s rifle? Lifton doesn’t say, but apparently they somehow found out where it was—on the garage floor at Ruth Paine’s house—and broke into the garage and stole it. Later, he suggests, they fired it twice at some undisclosed location, retrieved the two bullets, smashed one of them into several fragments, then planted these fragments in the limousine, as well as the whole bullet at Parkland Hospital, and Oswald’s rifle itself on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building.
⁴

Since Lifton’s theory not only presupposes
but requires
Oswald’s total innocence, how does Lifton handle Oswald and the warehouse full of evidence pointing to his guilt? Simply by ignoring both, for the most part, in his book. Out of his 747 pages, he unbelievably devotes no more than 6 or 7 full pages, if that, to Oswald. He dismissively treats Oswald almost like an afterthought, not even mentioning, for instance, his attempted murder of Major General Edwin Walker, and devoting only one sentence to Oswald’s murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. I understand. There wasn’t room in his book for such trivia.

Getting back to Lifton’s theory, is it a legitimate question to ask why didn’t the plotters, instead of firing the deadly bullets from the president’s right front (grassy knoll) and then, to frame Oswald, engage in the absolutely impossible task of stealing the president’s body to remove the bullets and create and alter bullet wounds to make it look as if the shots came from the rear, eliminate the need for this mission impossible by simply using Oswald’s rifle (that they had stolen) to fire the deadly shots from the rear—from a different window at the Book Depository Building than where Oswald was, or from the Dallas County Records Building on Houston Street? Lifton, who struggles mightily to convince his readers of the logic of his theory, knows he can’t answer that question sensibly, as he comes up with one sentence in his entire book that has no logic behind it, and he hopes the reader will gloss over it and not realize he hasn’t answered the question. He says the problem with firing Oswald’s rifle from the rear is that “more than one assassin would almost certainly be required to accomplish the assassination with precision because of numerous unpredictable factors: the position of bystanders, the president’s posture, etc.”
⁵
Of course, not only is this unresponsive and no answer to the question, but additionally, his assertion itself makes no sense.

Lifton did an enormous amount of thorough and meticulous research over a fifteen-year period (1964–1980) to prove his mad proposition—that conspirators had altered the president’s wounds before the autopsy. And miraculously, in his religious zeal and diligence, he actually found, like manna from heaven, evidence to support his theory. That evidence, the centerpiece of his fantasy, was found in a November 26, 1963, FBI document titled “Autopsy of Body of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy” written by FBI special agents Francis O’Neill Jr. and James W. Sibert.
⁶
On November 22, O’Neill and Sibert had been dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, to meet Air Force One as it arrived from Dallas with the president’s body. At Andrews, they received further instructions to accompany the body at all times, including during the motorcade from Andrews to Bethesda and during the autopsy. In their report, dictated four days later, they said on page 3, “It was ascertained that the President’s clothing had been removed and it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed,
as well as surgery of the head area
, namely in the top of the skull.”
⁷
Inasmuch as there was no surgery to the president’s head at Parkland Hospital, Lifton had his smoking gun, the proof there was surgical tampering with the president’s head by conspirators somewhere between Parkland and Bethesda. Lifton breathlessly tells his readers about his elation upon discovering this language in O’Neill and Sibert’s report: “
This
was the missing piece of the puzzle…I was exhilarated, terrified…Before the coffin arrived in the Bethesda autopsy room, somebody had performed ‘surgery’ on President Kennedy’s corpse…The [president’s] head was thrust backward by the impact of a bullet from the front, yet the autopsy performed at Bethesda showed an impact from behind. Someone had altered the head. I could hardly believe what I had found.” He goes on to say, “The scene conjured up was unbelievable [You’re right on that point, Mr. Lifton, unbelievable meaning “not worthy of belief.”]—the lid of a coffin raised at some secret location, unknown hands on the body, tools brought to bear, cutting into the corpse of John F. Kennedy.”
⁸

Before I elaborate on the impossibility of Lifton’s theory, let’s see what one of the FBI agents has to say about this entry in his report. In an October 24, 1978, affidavit to the HSCA, Agent James Sibert wrote, “When the body was first observed on the autopsy table, it was thought by the doctors that surgery had possibly been performed in the head area and such was reflected in my notes at the time. However, this was determined not to be correct following a detailed inspection.”
⁹

And in a 1999 telephone conversation from his retirement home in Fort Myers, Florida, Sibert told me that when the casket was opened in the autopsy room, “The president was wrapped in two sheets, one around his body, another sheet around his head.” He said the sheet around the head was “soaked in blood,” and when it was removed, Dr. Humes “almost immediately upon seeing the president’s head—this was before the autopsy—remarked that the president had a tracheotomy and surgery of the head area.”
*
When I asked Sibert what Humes was referring to when he used the word
surgery
, he said, “He was referring to the large portion of the president’s skull that was missing.” When I asked him why he was so sure of this, he replied, “Well, if you were there, it couldn’t have been more clear that that’s what he was talking about.
He said this as soon as he saw the president’s head. He hadn’t looked close-up for any evidence of surgery to the head when he said this
. I’m positive that’s what he was referring to.”
¹⁰
(Indeed, in Sibert and O’Neill’s five-page report, twelve of the paragraphs pertain to the autopsy, and the “surgery” reference is the first observational entry in the very first paragraph about the autopsy. The tracheotomy and surgery references immediately follow the words “following the removal of the wrapping.”) And in a 2001 interview, O’Neill said essentially the same thing as Sibert, that “the doctors’” statement referring to surgery to the head area was made “immediately during a cursory examination…It was
not
an exam. First viewing, put it that way…I think that was before the washing of the head.”
¹¹

It should be noted that absent a probing with the fingers—which was eventually done during the autopsy—since the scalp was covered with the president’s well-known thick growth of hair, any surgery to the scalp would have been impossible to detect visually. So almost necessarily, Humes had to be referring to the open defect. When Dr. Thornton Boswell, the other chief autopsy surgeon, was asked in his appearance before the ARRB in 1996, “Did you see any incisions that appeared to be any form of surgery in the head area prior to the time that you conducted any procedures at Bethesda,” he answered, “No.”
¹²

It should further be noted that the autopsy report on the president (number A63-272), which contains a ten-paragraph, detailed description of the condition of the president’s body when it arrived for the autopsy (including such details as “there is edema and ecchymosis of the inner canthus region of the left eyelid measuring approximately 1.5 cm. in greatest diameter”), there is absolutely no reference to observing surgery on the president’s head. There
is
a reference, however, to what Sibert referred to: “There is a large irregular defect of the scalp and skull on the right involving chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions. In this region there is an actual absence of scalp and bone producing a defect which measures 13 cm. in greatest diameter.”
¹³
†

So to believe Lifton’s theory, not only should one sentence in a report by two FBI agents with no medical background supersede the formal autopsy report written by the three pathologists who conducted the autopsy, but also we’d have to believe that the conspirators had “reached” all three autopsy surgeons who signed the report, and had instructed them (or, if necessary, I assume, threatened them with their lives) not to put in the report that they observed that surgery had been performed to the president’s head.

Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA, says that “Lifton’s theory—and I hate to even call it a theory—is totally bizarre. There is no medical or scientific evidence to support his claims.”
¹⁴

Even Dr. Cyril Wecht, who, it should be mentioned again, is the favorite and the most prominent doctor in the conspiracy community, says, “I have never accepted David Lifton’s theory. What he concluded can’t be done.” In the first place, Wecht says, if the president’s wounds had been altered before the autopsy, “they would be postmortem wounds and it would immediately be discernible to any pathologist, not just a forensic pathologist, that it had been done.” (After death, the heart, of course, stops pumping blood to the rest of the body. Therefore, postmortem “wounds,” with their lighter color and created by the alterationists, would be easily distinguishable by the autopsy surgeons from the real wounds Kennedy had sustained while his heart was still pumping blood. Lifton, in his prodigious monument to minutiae, never discusses the difference between postmortem and antemortem wounds.)