Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

257  US Immigration folder on Oswald's Mexico Trip


See also:
216 Mary's Box of 33 docs linking Oswald-Ruby-Castro
239 Passengerlist for Continental Trailways bus No. 5133 (original & copy)

Another apparent manifestation of official interest in Oswald was reported in the
press a few days after the assassination. The New York Post reported on November
25, 1963 that William Kline, chief of U.S. Customs at Laredo, had said
on the same date that Oswald's movements had been watched at the request of
a "federal agency at Washington." The New York Herald-Tribune reported on
November 26, 1963 that U.S. Customs official Oran Pugh had said that Oswald
had been checked by U.S. Immigration officials on entering and leaving
Mexico; Pugh had admitted that that was not the usual procedure but that "U.S.
Immigration has a folder on Oswald's trip."




Oran Gene Pugh (1928-2009)

So far as is known, those press reports were not followed by denials from
Kline or Pugh of the statements attributed to them.

The Warren Report does not mention the newspaper stories in the sections
which deal with Oswald's trip to Mexico City or even among the "speculations
and rumors" of which the Commission briskly disposed. (WR Appendix XII)

Kline and Pugh appear nowhere in the text except on the List of Witnesses
(WR Appendix V); in that list a symbol indicates that they provided affidavits
rather than testimony involving examination by Commission counsel.

Since the names "Kline" and "Pugh" appear in the List of Witnesses, the
Commission was aware of their existence and of the speculations provoked by
remarks attributed to them by newspapers. Those who had awaited the publica-
tion of the Warren Report in the anticipation that it would shed light on this
affair had to resign themselves to waiting longer, until the publication of the
Hearings and Exhibits, for illumination. It was hard to understand why the
rumors generated by Kline and Pugh were not debunked by the Commission in

Appendix XII of the Report, as was, for example, the rumor that a detachment
of the U.S. Army "began to rehearse for the funeral more than a week before
the assassination." (WR 668) The rumor that Oswald was being watched at the
request of "an official agency in Washington" seemed no less consequential than
the funeral rehearsal.

The impression that the Commission wished to avoid confronting the issue
was borne out when the Hearings and Exhibits finally became available. Mr.
Kline's affidavit (15H 640) states tersely:

I do not recall being interviewed by Harold Feldman [sic] who I am informed
represented the New York Post. . . . With respect to Lee Harvey
Oswald, I have no personal knowledge whatsoever of any check made on
him by the United States Public Health Service, Laredo, Texas, either upon
his entry into or exit from Mexico in 1963. I have no personal knowledge
whatsoever that any agency of the United States Government maintained a
surveillance of Oswald's movements, and I have never indicated to the contrary
to any news reporters. (15H 640)

Pugh's affidavit (15H 640-641) follows along the same lines. He "did not
recall" being interviewed by the New York Post, and "in any event" all information
he had given to reporters had been supplied by his assistant, Kline, and did
not derive from personal knowledge.


Pugh (right) in action

Kline's affidavit was executed on July 31, 1964; Pugh's, on August 26, 1964.
If there are any intermediate reports, interviews, or documents, they are not
evident in the Exhibits.

The affidavits do not dispose of the matter. They repudiate the story in the
New York Post (attributing it erroneously to Harold Feldman, who merely
referred to the story in the Post in an article in The Nation), but the reporter
who wrote the story was not questioned and we do not know whether, if he were
questioned, he would retract, modify, or maintain it. The belated pro forma disclaimers
from Pugh and Kline, his alleged sources, cannot by themselves resolve
the conflict. And what about the story in the New York Herald-Tribune? That
newspaper is not mentioned in the affidavits. Since the Herald-Tribune story of
November 23, 1963 remains unchallenged, may we regard it as accurate?

(Sylvia Maegher, Accessories after the fact, p. 316-17, 1967)

259  Document in Oswald’s handwriting that mentions his attack on Walker


related:
12  The identity of the reporter asking the Walker-question on 23-11-1963
214 The sender of the brown paper-parcel


"As painful as the entire ordeal was, Paine said she is grateful that she
    had a role in disclosing that note, as it  establishes that Lee Oswald had attempted
  an assassination just seven months before the murder of JFK."


Ruth Hyde Paine

Oswald’s widow is said to have declared that he boasted of shooting at that doughty warrior. In view of
her prolonged seclusion from the public, and even from relatives, under government supervision, we must
infer that any statement alleged to be hers at this time is a deliberate “leak.” It is interesting that a similar
“leak” at the beginning of the case — that a rifle which Mrs. Oswald knew her husband had kept in a garage
was missing on the morning of the assassination — proved to be false. The FBI is also reported to have
found a document in Oswald’s handwriting that mentions his attack on Walker, but once again the document
has not been produced for examination or reproduced in the press.

(Harold Feldman, OSWALD and the FBI, The Nation, pp. 86-89, 27 January 1964)

An undated note was found, but there is no mentioning of the Walker shooting:

Exhibit D-74 is a book entitled, "Book of Useful Advice" in the Russian language containing 865
pages the first 18 pages of which are missing . This is a book on cooking and other useful information
with green and blue binding in with book was found the letter written by LEE HARVEY OSWALD
concerning his attempted shooting of General EDWIN A. WALKER at Dallas, Texas on April 10, 1963 .

This book was obtained from Inspector TOM KELLEY U. S . Secret Service, Dallas, Texas on December
3, 1961. The results of investigation pertaining to this exhibit are reflected on page 710 of the report of
SA ROBERT P. GEMBERLING dated December 23, 1963 at Dallas, Texas; on page 51 of the report of SA
ROBERT P. GEMBERLING dated January 22, 1964 at Dallas, Texas ; and on page 59 of the report of SA
ROBERT P . GEMBERLING dated February 11, 1964 at Dallas, Texas.

(COMMISSION EXHIBIT No. 1971)


1958 edition of Russian 'Book of useful advice'

At 12:30 p.m., gunshots struck and mortally wounded President Kennedy as his motorcade passed near the
Dallas School Book Depository. At 1:22 p.m., police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald.

Quickly, police swarmed Ruth Paine's home. Investigators took Marina and her children to Dallas, essentially
severing the friendship with Paine. Two days later, Lee Oswald was dead from a pistol shot fired at close
range by Jack Ruby.

Over the next several days, Paine delivered baby clothes and other items to Marina through the police. On
Nov. 30, Paine asked officers to return to Marina one of her books, a Russian-language text for homemakers,
"Book of Useful Advice."

Inside the book, officers discovered the note that Marina Oswald found the night a shot was fired at ex-Gen.
Walker.

As painful as the entire ordeal was, Paine said she is grateful that she had a role in disclosing that note, as it
establishes that Lee Oswald had attempted an assassination just seven months before the murder of JFK.

(Oswald's wife finds a cryptic note from her husband)


Part of the original note. This note, according to the Sixth Floor Museum, convinced Ruth Paine
that Oswald was the lone assassin.

Note left by Oswald.—On December 2, 1963, Mrs. Ruth Paine turned over to the police some of the
Oswalds’ belongings, including a Russian volume entitled “Book of Useful Advice.” In this book was an
undated note written in Russian. In translation, the note read as follows:

1. This is the key to the mailbox which is located in the main
post office in the city on Ervay Street. This is the same street
where the drugstore, in which you always waited is located. You
will find the mailbox in the post office which is located 4
blocks from the drugstore on that street. I paid for the box
last month so don’t worry about it.

2. Send the information as to what has happened to me to the
Embassy and include newspaper clippings (should there be anything
about me in the newspapers). I believe that the Embassy will
come quickly to your assistance on learning everything.

3. I paid the house rent on the 2d so don’t worry about it.

4. Recently I also paid for water and gas.

5. The money from work will possibly be coming. The money will
be sent to our post office box. Go to the bank and cash the
check.

6. You can either throw out or give my clothing, etc. away. Do
not keep these. However, I prefer that you hold on to my
personal papers (military, civil, etc.)

7. Certain of my documents are in the small blue valise.

8. The address book can be found on my table in the study should
need same.

9. We have friends here. The Red Cross also will help you [Red
Cross in English].

10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of
the month. You and the baby [apparently] can live for another 2
months using $10 per week.

11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located
at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going
to the city (right in the beginning of the city after crossing
the bridge).

(gaylenixjackson.com)

Marina Oswald's testimony has been called into question in a number of matters, and her stories of murder
attempts by Oswald on Walker and Richard Nixon are fraught with inconsistencies and omissions. It is also
 curious that her first statement that Oswald tried to kill Walker came on December 3, 1963, about a week
after a West German newspaper reported there might be a connection between the Walker shooting and
the assassination. The Warren Commission reported that the German news story was "fabricated by the
editor," but then advanced the same allegation.

The note in question turned up only after the Kennedy assassination, when Secret Service agents showed
the note to Mrs. Ruth Paine and asked her to identify it. The undated note reportedly fell out of a book
found among Oswald's belongings.

Government handwriting experts declared that Oswald wrote the message and Marina conveniently told
investigators she thought she saw it shortly after the Walker shooting.

Federal investigators concluded that Oswald had written the note, which was in Russian, and that it had
been left in a Russian volume entitled Book of Useful Advice and was only discovered nearly two weeks
after the assassination when it fell out of the book's pages.

However, Mrs. Ruth Paine told the Warren Commission about the Dallas police search of her home
mentioning: "Before I left they were leafing through books to see if anything fell out but that is all I saw."
Mrs. Paine's testimony fuels the suspicion that the note may have been planted by authorities.
In the note, Oswald detailed instructions to his wife on what to do in his absence. He told her where the
mailbox key could be found, that the current bills had been paid and even said she could "throw out or give
my clothing, etc. away." Two notable passages state:

Send the information as to what has happened to me to the Embassy [undoubtedly the Russian embassy,
which Oswald had been contacting periodically] and include newspaper clippings—should there be anything
about me in the newspapers. I believe that the Embassy will come quickly to your assistance on learning
everything.

If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always
passed on going to the city (right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge).

These two sections raise troublesome questions for the official version of the Walker shooting.

Since Marina reportedly knew nothing of her husband's attack on Walker in advance, how could she be
expected to watch for stories on Oswald in the newspapers since any such account would only report that
an unknown sniper fired on the general? Also, why would a supposed American defector to Russia who
returned home expect assistance for his family from the Soviet embassy if he were charged with the
attempted murder of a prominent right-wing Dallasite?

Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher wrote:

I suggest that Oswald wrote the undated letter in relation to a project other than the attack on General
Walker—one that also involved risk of arrest or death—and that Marina was informed about her husband's
plans in advance.

(Jim Marrs, Crossfire)

261   Nixon's 18 1/2 minute White House tape gap


see also:
20   Fourteen minutes recording of Hoover – LBJ phonecall on 23-11-1963
150  E. Howard Hunt’s private (Kennedy) documents
205  Norman Similas' pictures and negatives
208  Letter of FBI of June 29, 1964, concerning Richard Nixon
250  Dori Dressander-J. Lee Rankin correspondence file


The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon
and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971
and 1973.

In February 1971, a sound-activated taping system was installed in the Oval Office, including in Nixon's
Oval Office desk, using Sony TC-800B open-reel tape recorders to capture audio transmitted by telephone
taps and concealed microphones. The system was expanded to include other rooms within the White
House and Camp David. The system was turned off on July 18, 1973, two days after it became public
knowledge as a result of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. Nixon was not the first president
to record his White House conversations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt recorded Oval Office press
conferences for a short period in 1940.

The tapes' existence came to light during the Watergate scandal of 1973 and 1974, when the system
was mentioned during the televised testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield before the
Senate Watergate Committee. Nixon's refusal of a congressional subpoena to release the tapes
constituted an article of impeachment against Nixon, and led to his subsequent resignation on August
9, 1974.

The 18 1/2 minute gap
According to President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a
tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings when she made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. While
playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she
said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call,
about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be
rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to 18 1⁄2 minutes. She later insisted that
she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.

The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation
between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in. Nixon claimed not to know
the topic or topics discussed during the gap. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that among the
topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel. White House lawyers first heard of the gap
on the evening of November 14, 1973, and Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes,
was not told until November 21, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent
explanation" they could offer.


Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder
for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration,
dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch", resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation.

(Wikipedia, retrieved 12-25-19)


Former Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford

Traditionally, documentary materials accumulated by a President during his term of office have been
treated as if they were his private property. (...) Events during the last years of the Nixon Presidency
changed this situation, and it is to these developments that this Commission owes its existence.

(...)

On September 8, 1974, President Ford announced his pardon of former President Nixon. That same day it
was also announced that Mr. Nixon and the Director of the General Services Administration, Arthur
Sampson, had entered into an agreement, dated September 7, 1974, which provided for the disposition 
of the Nixon Presidential materials under the provisions of the Presidential Libraries Act. (44 USC 2101 et
seq.) This instrument, the so-called Nixon-Sampson Agreement, not only gave to Mr. Nixon the right to
control access to the materials, but also provided among other things for the destruction of President
Nixon's White House tapes by 1984, and permitted Mr. Nixon to withdraw materials of his own choosing
from Federal custody after three years.

(National Study Commission on Records and Documents of Federal Officials*, Final Report, p. 9, 1977)

*Dori Dressander and J. Lee Rankin were on this commission (see #250)

On June 22, after returning to the White House, Nixon made his first public comment on the burglary. He
flatly asserted that “the White House has had no involvement whatever” in the break- in. And he
declared, with a straight face, that such an event “has no place in our electoral process or in our
governmental process.”

On the twenty-third, in an effort to get the CIA to stop the FBI’s initial Watergate probe, Nixon tried to
blackmail CIA Director Richard Helms, apparently by using his knowledge of major CIA secrets to keep the
lid on Watergate.

The president wanted to scare Helms with the prospect that, under pressure, an apprehended Hunt might
start blabbing to authorities about “the Bay of Pigs.” That phrase, to Bob Haldeman— Nixon’s most trusted
aide—was secret Nixon- CIA code for one of the darkest events in our history, an event with tenuous ties
to the disastrous 1961 Cuban invasion.


Dick Helms

In a post-Watergate book, Haldeman disclosed, “It seems that in all those Nixon references to the Bay of
Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination. (Interestingly, an investigation of the Kennedy
assassination was a project I suggested when I first entered the White House. Now I felt we would be in
a position to get all the facts. But Nixon turned me down.)”

Watergate expert and National Public Radio correspondent Daniel Schorr independently concurs with
Haldeman that Nixon’s Watergate threat to the CIA about “the Bay of Pigs” was “about some deeply hidden
scandal . . . an assassination or something on that order. It was supposed to involve the CIA and President
Kennedy.” Schorr also says that, to this day, “Helms vows that he has no idea what dark secret Nixon was
alluding to. But, whatever it was, it led Nixon into trying to enlist the CIA in an attempted obstruction of
justice that became his final undoing.” 

Speculating separately, JFK assassination expert Jim Marrs— without knowing about Haldeman’s revelation—
asks two perceptive questions about taped “Bay of Pigs” conversations between Nixon and his most trusted
adviser: Could they have been circuitously referring to the interlocking connections between CIA agents,
anti- Castro Cubans, and mobsters that likely resulted in the Kennedy assassination? Did they themselves
have some sort of insider knowledge of this event?


Nixon and Haldeman

In his book, Haldeman added that the CIA pulled off a “fantastic cover- up” that “literally erased any
connection between the Kennedy assassination and the CIA.” Haldeman never revealed his source, but
evidence points to Nixon. “Virtually nothing Nixon did was done without Haldeman’s knowledge,” said
John Ehrlichman. “That is not to say that Haldeman approved everything Nixon said or did; but it was
essential that he know, and have a chance to object, before it happened.”

Ehrlichman went to his grave without spilling any “Bay of Pigs” secrets, but he did write a novel about
a president and a CIA chief trying to blackmail each other over a previous assassination plot that
involved both men.

If Haldeman knew about the CIA’s alleged involvement in the Kennedy murder, Nixon certainly did.

(Don Fulsom, Nixon’s Bay of Pigs Secrets, 2012)

263  Photograph of President Kennedy's head wounds taken at Parkland Hospital


see also:
85 Henry González' images of Kennedy's body at Parkland

Mr. SPRAGUE said that from HOLLAND McCOMBS he received the information that MELVIN BELLI tried to sell a
photograph to Life Magazine. These were photographs taken in the jail and included all of the people who were in the
jail with JACK RUBY at the time he was taken into custody.


Ruby attorney Tom Howard 1917-1965

SPRAGUE goes on to state that BELLI had hinted at a photograph like the one which TOM HOWARD had discussed. The
photograph HOWARD had discussed was a photograph of President Kennedy's head wounds taken at Parkland Hospital.
Further information about this matter will be relayed to the office by SPRAGUE.

(Memo from Steven Jaffe to Jim Garisson, January 26, 1968)