Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

452 The original left lateral X-ray


Compare:
451 The 6.5 mm object on the AP (frontal) X-ray

The T-shaped inscription on the left lateral X-ray. The purpose of this inscription is unknown,
but in any case, that is irrelevant.


This is not a JFK x-ray, but an example marked x-ray of an anonymous patient

Here are what matters. This inscription must have been produced by removing the emulsion
from the original film, which is easy to do (e.g., by using a fingernail, or a metal nail, or even a
nail file). This missing emulsion would have been easy to detect on the surface of the film,
especially while viewing it at an angle to a light source. Inspection of the other side would clearly
have shown no missing emulsion. Realizing this, during my final visit to the Archives (April 12,
2001),30 I inspected this area carefully. I first asked Steve Tilley, the JFK archivist, to remove
the X-ray from its transparent plastic sheath so that I could view the surfaces directly. He did
so. And then I saw that no emulsion was missing from either side of the film! The conclusion
was obvious: this could only be a copy film—not an original. That is because the copy film would
preserve the image of the T inscription, but it would also retain its own emulsion (on both
sides)—because no one had scraped emulsion off the (double emulsion) copy film.

So, why does it matter if this is a copy? Here is the answer: if an X-ray can be copied, then it
can also be altered—via a double exposure in the darkroom.

(David W. Mantik, JFK Assassination Paradoxes: a Primer for Beginners)

454   Jewel #1: the CIA's top transgression


More tricks:
150  E. Howard Hunt’s private (Kennedy) documents
261   Nixon's 18 1/2 minute White House tape gap
316  What Nixon knew

 
    'Although the CIA released the Jewels to the public in 2007,
Jewel #1 remains, at the time of this writing, redacted.'


A glimpse into the CIA's 'family jewels'
June 26, 2007

WASHINGTON — The CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports Tuesday on assassination plots, secret drug testing and spying on Americans that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s.

The documents detail assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, the testing of mind- and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, the wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of former CIA employees and others.


Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA's illegal domestic operations with a front page
story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974.

The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973, were turned over at that time to three investigative panels - President Gerald Ford's Rockefeller Commission, the Senate's Church committee and the House's Pike committee.

The panels spent years investigating and amplifying on the documents, and their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages.

That scandal sullied the reputation of the intelligence community and led to new rules for the CIA, the FBI and other spy agencies, and new permanent committees in Congress to oversee them.

Among the more famous misdeeds was the Castro plot.

Roselli introduced Maheu to "Sam Gold" and "Joe," who were actually two mobsters on the FBI's most-wanted list: Momo Giancana, Al Capone's successor in Chicago, and Santos Trafficant.


Robert Mahue (1917-2008) CIA-mafia liaison & Howard Hughes minion

The CIA gave them six poison pills and they tried unsuccessfully for several months to have several people put them in the Cuban leader's food. The plot was dropped after the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but other plots continued against Castro. Details of this plot first appeared in Jack Anderson's newspaper column in 1971.

The documents also were a product of the Watergate scandal. The director of the CIA at the time, James Schlesinger, was angered to read in the newspapers that the agency had provided support to E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, two former agents who were convicted in the Watergate break-in.

Hunt had worked for a secret "plumbers unit" in Richard Nixon's White House. The unit originally was tasked to investigate and end leaks of classified information, but ultimately engaged in a wide range of misconduct.

E. Howard Hunt Leaves Senate Office After Conferring With Watergate Investigative Committee

In May 1973 Schlesinger ordered "all senior operating officials of this agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this agency." The law establishing the CIA barred it from spying inside the United States.

The result was the 693 pages of memos, which arrived after Schlesinger had moved to the Pentagon and had been replaced as CIA chief by William Colby. Colby ultimately reported the contents to the Justice Department.

"These are the top CIA officers all going into the confessional and saying, 'Forgive me father, for I have sinned,' " said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which had requested the release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Inside the CIA, Colby referred to the documents as the "skeletons." But another name quickly caught on and stuck: "family jewels."

They first spilled into public view on Dec. 22, 1974, with a story by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times, which detailed how the CIA spied against anti-war and other dissidents inside the United States.

The agency assembled files on about 10,000 people.

Other CIA documents that have been released show that the Soviet leadership undertook a hasty shakeup of top government and Communist Party posts following the death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 to head off possible "panic and disarray" among the country's long-repressed population.

(New York Times)



Members of the Church committee and Pike committee members saw the Family Jewels. A number of people did. But to date, no one has told what's behind the redactions in Jewel #1. Although the CIA “released” the Jewels to the public in 2007, Jewel #1 remains, at the time of this writing, redacted. Whatever the CIA's top transgression was, we, the people, still don't know about it.

(Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big To Fail, p. 367, 2017)


Top Ten Most Interesting "Family Jewels"
Released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, June 26, 2007

1) Journalist surveillance - operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26-30)

2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport (pp. 28, 644-45)

3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker (p. 107)

4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett "thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program" (Sidney Gottlieb's drug experiments) (p. 213)

5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation (p. 326)

6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464)

7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko (p. 522)

8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists (p. 552)

9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) (pp. 591-93)

10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc. (pp. 599-603)

Plus a bonus "Jewel":
Warrantless wiretapping by CIA's Division D 

(The National Security Archive)

456 Draft of Liebeler report relating to Odio


Context:
138  One Vial, Hamilton, Koch & Knox-file on Jack Ruby
201  Over half of the Doyle film
257  US Immigration folder on Oswald's Mexico Trip
260  Pre-assassination reports and files of FBI agent Wally Heitman
369  FBI interview of William Gaudet


"Draft of part of report of September 3, 1964 by Wesley J. Liebeler relating to Sylvia [sic] Odio"

(National Archives, Security Classification: Problems Involving Warren Commission, 1975)


Silvia Odio swore to the Warren Commission that she met Lee Harvey Oswald in the company of two Cubans in Dallas in
September 1963. If she could be believed, that would mean a probable conspiracy. She was not believed.

If the Warren Commission had found that Silvia Odio was telling the truth, its final conclusion that
Oswald was not part of a conspiracy would have been undermined. Odio claimed that Oswald was
one of three men who came to the door of her apartment in Dallas one evening in the last week of
September 1963. The Commission dismissed Odio’s testimony because, it said, it had
“considerable evidence” that Oswald had not been in Dallas at all that September.

It had nothing of the sort. The Warren Commission’s problem was that if Oswald had gone to
Dallas on his way from New Orleans to Mexico City, he would have had to have private
transportation and, because he did not have a car and could not drive, that meant that others were
involved with him. And the Warren Commission did not want to have to deal with that.
My discovery of Silvia Odio in Miami was important because in investigating her story I would
open a new area of evidence with explosive potential. Silvia Odio’s background is relevant. She
was the oldest of ten children spirited out of Cuba when their parents became active in anti-Castro
activity. Her father, Amador Odio, was among Cuba’s wealthiest men, owner of the country’s
largest trucking business and once described by Time as the “transport tycoon” of Latin America.

But both he and his wife, Sarah, were idealists and had fought against dictators from the time of
General Machado in the ’30s. They were among Castro’s early supporters and among the first to
turn against him when “Fidel betrayed the Revolution,” as Amador Odio would later say. With
liberal leader Manolo Ray, they helped to form one of the first anti-Castro groups within Cuba. (...)

By September 1963, Silvia Odio was established in Dallas’s Cuban-exile community. She had a
decent job, had her emotional problems under control, and was planning to move into an apartment
more comfortable than the rental unit in which she and her four children were squeezed. Moving
day was set for Monday, October 1, 1963. The week before she was scheduled to move, her sister
Annie, then seventeen, came to the apartment to help her pack and to babysit. When the doorbell
rang early one evening in that last week of September, Annie went to the door to answer it.
Later I would talk with Annie Odio, who is now also living in Miami. She is married to an
architect and has two children. She remembered the evening at Silvia’s apartment in Dallas. One of
the men asked to speak to Sarita. He initially spoke English, but when Annie answered him in
Spanish he spoke Spanish. Annie told him that Sarita didn’t live there. “He then said something—I
don’t recall exactly what, something about her being married—which made me think that they
really wanted my sister Silvia. I recall putting the chain on the door while I went to get Silvia.”

Annie told me that two of the men were Latin-looking and that one was shorter than the other and
heavyset, had dark, shiny hair, and “looked Mexican.” She said the third man was an American.
Annie Odio recalled that Silvia was initially reluctant to talk with the visitors because she was
getting dressed to go out, but she remembers Silvia coming out of the bedroom in her bathrobe to
go to the door.

Silvia Odio had told me she had been getting dressed to go out when the three men came to the
door. The men were standing in the vestibule just inside the small front porch. Both the porch and
the vestibule had bright overhead lights. Silvia said the men told her they were members of JURE
and spoke as if they knew both Manolo Ray and her father. Her conversation, she said, was
exclusively with the taller Latin, who identified himself as “Leopoldo,” although he admitted he
was giving her an alias or a “war name,” the use of which was common among anti-Castro activists
at the time. She said she was less certain of the other Latin’s name—it might have been
“Angelo”—but she described him as her sister did, “looking more Mexican than anything else.”
The third visitor, the American, was introduced to her as “Leon Oswald.” She said “Leon Oswald”
acknowledged the introduction with a very brief reply, perhaps in idiomatic Spanish, but she later
decided he could not understand Spanish because of his lack of reaction to her Spanish
conversation with “Leopoldo.”


The house where Silvia Odio lived. One night, about a month before Dallas,
Cuban exiles "Leopoldo" and "Angelo" rang her doorbell, and they brought along
"Leon Oswald", who was "crazy" and said "Cubans should go after Kennedy, kill
Kennedy."

There is no doubt in Silvia Odio’s mind that this visitor was Lee Harvey Oswald: She was with the
men more than twenty minutes and, although she did not permit them in her apartment, she was
less than three feet from them as they stood in the well-lit vestibule. She said Oswald and the other
two men appeared tired, unkempt, and unshaven, as if they had just come from a long trip.
“Leopoldo” told Silvia Odio that the reason they had come to her was to get her help in soliciting
funds, in the name of JURE, from local businessmen. “He told me,” she recalled, “that he would
like for me to write them, in English, very nice letters and perhaps we could get some funds.”
Silvia was suspicious of the strangers and avoided any commitment, and the conversation ended
with “Leopoldo” giving her the impression he would contact her again. After the men left, Silvia
locked her door and went to the window to watch them. She saw them pull away in a red car that
had been parked in front of the apartment.

The following day or the day after—Silvia was never certain about that—she received a call from
“Leopoldo.” She is relatively certain about the gist of what “Leopoldo” told her in that telephone
conversation, and it is consistent with her testimony to the Warren Commission. She said that
“Leopoldo” told her that “the gringo” had been a Marine, that he was an expert marksman, and that
he was “kind of loco.” She recalled: “He said that the Cubans, we did not have any guts because
we should have assassinated Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.”

(Gaeton Fonzi, Who killed JFK, The Washingtonian, 1980)


Wesley Liebeler passed away in 2002

The Warren Commission was hampered, of course, by the FBI’s initial bungling in investigating
the incident. Silvia Odio had provided good physical descriptions of her visitors and details about
their car. The FBI did not vigorously pursue those leads but instead spent most of its time
questioning people about Silvia’s credibility and her emotional problems. The Bureau’s first
For J. Lee Rankin, chief interview with Silvia Odio was on December 12, 1963. On August 23, 1964,
with the first drafts of the Warren Commission report being written. Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin
wrote to J. Edgar Hoover:

“It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either
be proved or disproved.” A month later, with the report in galley form, the Odio incident was still
a concern to some staffers. In a memo to his boss, staff counsel Wesley Liebeler wrote: “There are
problems. Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad if it turns out that she is. There
is no need to look foolish by grasping at straws to avoid admitting that there is a problem.”

(Sylvia [sic] Odio vs. Liebeler & the La Fontaines, James DiEugenio, 1996)

She said that after Liebeler questioned her for the second time that day (the first interrogation started at 9 a.m.; the second at 6:30 p.m.) he asked her out to dinner. "That surprised me, but I was afraid and I went. We didn't go out alone. We went out with someone who was supposed to be Marina Oswald's lawyer. I don't remember his name, but Mr. Phillips from CBS knew. We went to the Sheraton to eat dinner. I thought perhaps there was something behind it and there was a kind of double talk at the table between the lawyer and him. I wasn't sure they wanted me to hear the conversation or they wanted to convince me of something or wanted me to volunteer something. He (Liebeler) kept threatening me with a lie detector test also, even though he knew I was under tremendous stress at the time. But one thing he said, and this has always bothered me, he said to this other gentleman, I don't remember his name, he said, "Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up." (I asked: Liebeler said that?) "Yes, sir, I could swear on that." At the time, she said she thought that maybe it was a bait for her because she had the feeling that they thought she was hiding something more, that she was involved with other Cuban groups perhaps or that she knew more than she was saying. "That was the feeling that I got by the time that they took me to dinner, that maybe if I had a few drinks and the conversation became very casual, I would go ahead and volunteer information he thought I was hiding. I wasn't hiding anything. But what he said struck me. I remember I had a Bloody Mary and thinking to myself, "My God, I'm not that drunk." I had one Bloody Mary and that's all I was having. If it was for my sake that he was saying that, it if it was a little game they were playing with me, I don't know. That's when I said to myself, "Silvia, the time has come for you to keep quiet. They don't want to know the truth."

(Gaeton Fonzi Notes – Silvia Odio interviewed 1/16/76, JFK ACT, released per 5-2-96)

458 Relevant portion PO Box 6225 application



Related:
221 Original application forms for boxes 2915 and 6225 in Dallas and box 30061 in New Orleans
416 Relevant portion PO Box 2915 application
457 The receipt for the Mannlicher Carcano


        'Unfortunately, none of the Warren investigators noticed this discrepancy,
which appears to implicate the postal authorities in the willful destruction of evidence.'


The Friday, November 1 of [FBI agent James] Hosty's first visit to the Paine house was a busy day for a man who put in a full day of work at the Texas School Book Depository. By 2:30 in the afternoon, Oswald had opened a post office box – his last, after the earlier boxes in Dallas and New Orleans.


400 Ervay Street, Dallas

We learn from the application for this final postal box that he listed his home address as 3610 North Beckley Street. Again, a contradiction surfaces. The procedure for opening a box at any U.S. Post Office involves a preliminary check on the home residence address written on the application. The postal-route carrier must confirm this address before the box is issued – a precaution, among other things, against postal fraud. But in Oswald's case, for two entirely sufficient reasons, this confirmation could not have been made. First, the home address Oswald listed on the box application was nonexistent: there is no 3600 block of North Beckley. Second, Oswald was supposedly living under the name O.H. Lee at his actual residence, 1206 North Beckley. With neither a name nor an address that worked, the carrier could hardly have confirmed the validity of the application.

Another facet of the November 1 postal box application is noteworthy. Under the heading of “name of firm or corporation” to be using the box, Oswald listed two organizations: the familiar FPCC, and a new group, which he would join that same day, the American Civil Liberties Union. The double listing served the apparent purpose of linking two entities that otherwise, apart from Oswald's membership in each, had no connection. Less than a week after the assassination FBI director Hoover would have occasion to use this fortuitous association, claiming it as evidence that the supposed assassin was a Communist – for “he was a member of the ACLU in New York, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

But whereas the implications of this double listing have been previously noted, Warren critics have hitherto failed to mark a more subtle and significant problem with the November 1 P.O. Box application. As had been the case with the earlier Dallas box that was used as a return address for the mail-order gun purchases, the portion of the application authorizing other persons to receive mail would also turn up missing for this, Oswald's last postal box. Dallas postal authorities appear to have been quite thorough in losing all paper trails that might have led to other persons involved in either the receipt of the rifle or in receiving mail at Oswald's post office boxes. In the case of the November application, however, the authorities couldn't use the fraudulent excuse used for an earlier box in Dallas: that postal regulations called for destruction of this portion of the application upon closing of the box. (They didn't.) The last box was still open when Oswald died. Unfortunately, none of the Warren investigators noticed this discrepancy, which appears to implicate the postal authorities in the willful destruction of evidence.

(Ray and Mary LaFontaine, Oswald talked, p. 230-232)