Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

515 The Christensen intercept


Compare:
116 Gary Underhill's JFK Assassination notes
212 The identity of the mystery Oxnard area caller
251 Papers compiled by crypto-code operator Eugene Dinkin foretelling a military plot against JFK

The time is October 1963. The place is an Air Force Base in Kirknewton (Scotland), located approximately 11 miles west of the capital city, Edinburgh. A US Air Force (USAF) Security Service member is carrying out his regular duties at the base. Although it is in the United Kingdom, the base is currently under the control of the USAF Security Service. His duties include monitoring and reporting intelligence communication traffic to his supervisors. They then relay this information on to the National Security Agency (NSA) Headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The individual’s name is David Christensen.

Christensen is listening to communications coming out of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Suddenly, he eavesdrops on a link between Lisbon and Tangier (Morocco) that mentions a high-ranking figure in organized crime and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Recognizing the importance and gravitas of such an intercept, he immediately informs his supervisors, confident in the knowledge that they will pass the information up the chain of command.

Christensen had done his duty. He was relieved. He may even have felt that because of the important content of the intercept, it would have been given Critical Intelligence Communications status, otherwise known as CRITIC. Such messages should be alerted to the President and other senior government officials within minutes, if possible.


Site of RAF Kirknewton

A few weeks later, when Christensen heard the news of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963, his heart sank. His life then followed a similarly low trajectory. As he said himself, in a letter he wrote in May 1978, to a fellow officer [Sergeant Nicholas Stevenson] who served with him at the RAF Kirknewton base, “it really broke me up after Nov. 22, 63 especially when I had it all beforehand.” We will return to this letter shortly.

(...)

Once Stevenson had read the letter, he alerted the USAF Security Service, who in turn notified the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). An OSI agent, based at the Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado, was assigned to contact Christensen, and interview him about the letter. This interview took place on or around 1 June 1978.

(...)

The government agencies at this point clearly seemed to be more concerned about who else Christensen may have talked to about the letter, rather than the actual claim made about the JFK assassination and organized crime.

(...)

The HSCA were indeed made aware of Christensen’s claim and on 8 November 1978, Chief Counsel Blakey met with a representative of the NSA to discuss further. The memorandum written up from this meeting confirmed that Christensen had been committed to “a mental institution” because of the October 1963 intercept. Blakey posed several questions to the NSA including what their capability was to retrieve communications from Kirknewton from the time period in question, and whether Christensen really was working for the USAF at the time and doing the kind of work consistent with “intercepting commercial communications.”


David Christensen passed away Monday, December 22, 2008 at his home in Killdeer, ND.

(...)

On 21 November 1978, Eugene Yeates wrote a further letter to confirm that the NSA had “made a thorough search of all records” pertinent to the allegation made by Christensen and that “no communications or information relating to the Committee’s request” had been located. This letter was only released in full in November 2017 under the JFK Records Collections Act 1992.
Another document only released in full at this time was from Harold Parish of the NSA. His memorandum was dated 2 January 1979. In it, Parish outlines the scope of the search conducted by the NSA to find materials relevant to the Kirknewton incident. He concluded that the NSA had “done all reasonable things to locate the reported intercept with negative results.” Just before concluding this, he also admitted that the search only really consisted of a look through three boxes from 1963 containing unidentified materials. There were nearly 10,000 products on file from January through November 1963 that would take a minimum of four weeks to go through
(...)

The reality of the search is underlined by another memorandum dated 13 December 1978, this time by C. Baldwin of the NSA. Baldwin’s memo confirmed “that a review of the documents in these three unidentified boxes would constitute a reasonable effort to find the alleged record” and that the “latest date in the box was 1962.” We know Christensen’s intercept was made in October 1963. Baldwin’s memo goes on to state that Mr. Sapp of the NSA “requested that an additional search be made of materials dated later than 1963” but that after reviewing the listing of such boxes, “nothing on the list merits such a search.”

(Scott Reid, The Kirknewton Incident)

517 Ralph Yates’ polygraph


Related:
147 Frazier's phantom polygraph
399 Curtain rods

        The man’s comments were, like “Oswald’s” behavior in the series of self-incriminating incidents we have already seen,
                an obvious attempt to draw attention to himself as a potential presidential assassin.

Ralph Leon Yates was a refrigeration mechanic for the Texas Butcher Supply Company in Dallas, making his rounds to meat outlets on Wednesday, November 20, 1963. At 10:30 A.M. Ralph Yates was driving on the R. L. Thornton Expressway. He noticed a man hitchhiking in Oak Cliff near the Beckley Avenue entrance to the expressway. Yates stopped to pick up the man.

When the hitchhiker got into Yates’s pickup truck, he was carrying what Yates described later, in a statement to the FBI, as “a package wrapped in brown wrapping paper about 4 feet to 4½ feet long.”


The Texas Butcher Supply Company in Dallas closed its doors after 121 years in 2019.

Yates told the man he could put the package in the back of the pickup. The man said the package had curtain rods in it, and he would rather carry it with him in the cab of the truck.

Yates mentioned to the man that people were getting excited about the president’s upcoming visit. He had broached a subject the man was eager to talk about. The man had a remarkable sense, as seen later, of what would become the government’s case against Lee Harvey Oswald. The man also looked so much like Oswald that he was in effect his double. Or was he actually Oswald?

As cited by the FBI, Ralph Yates recalled the hitchhiker’s comments: “Yates stated the man then asked Yates if he thought a person could assassinate the President. Yates replied that he guessed such a thing could be possible. The man then asked Yates if it could be done from the top of a building or out of a window, high up, and Yates said he guessed this was possible if one had a good rifle with a scope and was a good shot.

“Yates advised about this time the man pulled out a picture which showed a man with a rifle and asked Yates if he thought the President could be killed with a gun like that one. Yates said he was driving and did not look at the picture but indicated to the man that he guessed so.

“Yates said that the man then asked if he knew the President’s route for the parade in Dallas and Yates replied that he did not know the route but that it had been in the paper. He said the man then said that he had misunderstood him and that actually he had asked Yates if he thought that the President would change his route. Yates said he replied that he doubted it unless they might for safety reasons.”


I think this is about the location where Ralph Yates picked up a hitchhiker with curtain rods on 20-11-1963. Yates passed
a lie detector test about his spectacular story. 

The hitchhiker asked to be let off along Houston Street. Yates dropped him off at Elm and Houston, the stoplight by the Texas School Book Depository. He last saw the man carrying his package of “curtain rods” across Elm Street—perhaps into the Book Depository.

When Ralph Yates returned to his workplace at the Texas Butcher Supply Company, he told his co-worker, Dempsey Jones, about his strange conversation with the man he picked up in Oak Cliff and dropped off at Elm and Houston who was carrying the package. Dempsey Jones thereby became a supporting witness to Yates’s account. He confirmed in an FBI interview that it was before President Kennedy was assassinated that Yates described picking up the hitchhiker, “who discussed the fact with him that one could be in a building and shoot the President as he, the President, passed by.”

After Yates saw the pictures in the media of Lee Harvey Oswald, he said the man he gave the ride to was “identical with Oswald.”

However, the FBI was not happy with the statement Ralph Leon Yates volunteered to them on November 26, repeated at the FBI’s request on December 10, and repeated yet again at their further requests on January 3 and 4, 1964, finally during an FBI polygraph examination. Although Yates’s statement seemed to be a thorough incrimination of the now dead Oswald, once again—as in other “Oswald” appearances—it proved too much for the government’s case, even placing that case in jeopardy. As the FBI would make clear, the witness wasn’t wanted. They kept recalling him only in order to discredit his story.

What was so unacceptable about Ralph Yates’s testimony?

In terms of the hitchhiker’s looks, itinerary, and comments, he was either Lee Harvey Oswald or a well-informed double. The Beckley Avenue entrance to the Thornton Expressway was on the same street as Oswald’s rooming house, located at 1026 North Beckley. The man looking like Oswald had hitched a ride from the vicinity of Oswald’s rooming house to the location of Oswald’s workplace, the Texas School Book Depository.

The man’s comments were, like “Oswald’s” behavior in the series of self-incriminating incidents we have already seen, an obvious attempt to draw attention to himself as a potential presidential assassin.

Most significant in this instance was the package in brown wrapping paper that the man insisted on keeping with him in the cab, which he said contained “curtain rods.” The package of “curtain rods” carried by Yates’s hitchhiker corresponds to Oswald’s notorious cover story in the Warren Report for sneaking his rifle into the Book Depository.

As the Warren Report describes this incident, it was on Thursday, November 21, that Lee Oswald asked his co-worker, Buell Wesley Frazier, if he could ride home with him that afternoon. Frazier lived in Irving half a block from Ruth Paine’s house, where Oswald’s wife, Marina, and their two daughters were then staying. Frazier asked Oswald why he wanted to ride with him on Thursday rather than Friday, when Lee normally went to the Paine household to stay with his family over the weekend. Lee’s answer reportedly was: “I’m going home to get some curtain rods . . . [to] put in an apartment.”

According to Frazier and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, the next morning Oswald brought a brown paper package “about 2' long”[769] with him when he rode in Frazier’s car back to the Book Depository. Frazier told the Warren Commission that when he asked Oswald what was in the package, he replied, “Curtain rods.”

Despite the fact that the package Frazier and Randle claimed they saw was too small to hold even a rifle that was broken down, and although no one else saw Oswald with any package at all that morning, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald must have used such a ruse to smuggle his rifle from Ruth Paine’s garage into the Depository Building. In the Warren Report, the “curtain rod story” is the critical lie that supposedly enabled Oswald to carry secretly the weapon he then used to murder the president.

What, then, are we to make of Ralph Yates’s Oswald-like hitchhiker who prophetically acted out the “curtain rod story” two days before Lee Oswald reportedly reenacted it, in his ride with Buell Wesley Frazier to the Texas School Book Depository the morning of November 22?

    Hoover noted that a previous FBI investigation into Yates provided insufficient evidence “to completely discredit Yates’ story.”

Had there been no second curtain rod/rifle delivery by Oswald to the Depository, the first as done by the “Oswald” Ralph Yates picked up could have served the Warren Report quite well. Oswald could have been portrayed as smuggling the rifle into the Depository on Wednesday, then hiding it on the sixth floor of the building until he used it to shoot the president on Friday. In that version of the story, Yates could have been a valuable witness for the government against an already dead, media-convicted assassin.

However, just as there was once again a problem of too many Oswalds—with one working his regular hours in the Book Depository, while the other was hitchhiking with Yates—so, too, was there a problem of too many curtain rod deliveries to account for one rifle being smuggled into the building. The trail of duplicating curtain rod stories led not to a lone assassin but to an intelligence operation tripping over itself while working overtime to scapegoat Oswald.

Ralph Yates was a stubborn witness to what turned out to be unwanted evidence. On his second trip to the Dallas FBI office on December 10, 1963, he repeated and signed his statement about picking up the hitchhiker with the curtain rods. From his first contact with the FBI, Yates, who had pointed out that he was married with five children, said he “would appreciate not receiving any type of publicity from the fact he was furnishing this information.” About that concern he need not have worried. The FBI would make certain his testimony to another Oswald with a second curtain rods story would be buried from public view.

On January 2, 1964, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a teletype marked “URGENT” to Dallas Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin on Ralph Leon Yates. Hoover noted that a previous FBI investigation into whether Yates may have been at his company at the same time he said he picked up the Oswald-like hitchhiker provided insufficient evidence “to completely discredit Yates’ story.” Hoover therefore ordered the Dallas FBI office to “reinterview Yates with polygraph,” the instrument more commonly known as a “lie detector.”

On January 4 in another “URGENT” teletype, Shanklin reported back to Hoover on Yates’s polygraph examination that day: “Results of test were inconclusive as Yates responded to neither relevant or control type questions.” Because his lie-detector test was inconclusive, Yates had still not been discredited. But there was more to come.

During his final, January 4 trip to the FBI office, Ralph Yates was accompanied by his wife, Dorothy. He had asked her to come with him. In an interview forty-two years later, she told me what happened next to her husband. After he completed his (inconclusive) lie-detector test, she said, the FBI told him he needed to go immediately to Woodlawn Hospital, the Dallas hospital for the mentally ill. He drove there with Dorothy. He was admitted that evening as a psychiatric patient. From that point on, he spent the remaining eleven years of his life as a patient in and out of mental health hospitals.


Yates died at age 39 in 1975 as a patient of the Rusk State Hospital

A crucial transition in the psychic health of Ralph Yates seems to have occurred at the FBI office on January 4, 1964. Something the FBI said after Ralph’s polygraph test puzzled and disturbed Dorothy:

“They told me that he was telling the truth [according to the polygraph machine], but that basically he had convinced himself that he was telling the truth. So that’s how it came out. He strongly believed it, so it came out that way.”

According to what the FBI told Dorothy Yates, the data that registered on the polygraph machine, as then read in the normal way by the polygraph examiner, showed that Ralph Yates was telling the truth. His test was officially recorded as “inconclusive” (meaning the examiner wasn’t sure if Yates was telling the truth) only because J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had decided what the truth had to be for Yates. The FBI-defined truth was that Yates had not picked up the Oswald-like hitchhiker with the “curtain rods” package, because for the FBI there could be no such hitchhiker. Therefore Ralph Leon Yates, by being so definitive (as shown by his polygraph chart) in knowing that he did precisely that—picked up a nonexistent hitchhiker—could only have lost touch with reality. What for any other polygraphed person would serve as proof of truth-telling was, in the case of Yates, proof only of an illusory divorce from reality. The wrenching but undeniable truth for Yates, that he helped a man he thought was the president’s assassin deliver what could have been his weapon to the Book Depository, was what compelled him to contact the FBI in the first place.

(James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 350-355)

519  One discarded pair of trousers 


Related:
365 Who owned the jacket discarded by Officer J. D. Tippit's assailant?

So far as is known, Oswald's shirt was intact until the scuffle in the Texas Theater which culminated in his arrest. If so, the fact that Mrs. Bledsoe saw the shirt already torn, an hour before the scuffle, would be an anachronism. (None of the witnesses who saw Oswald before the bus ride—Wesley Frazier, Officer Baker, and Roy Truly—suggested that his shirt was ripped or torn.)



Moreover, Oswald told Captain Fritz that during his brief visit to his room he had changed his trousers and his shirt, "because they were dirty," and that he had placed them "in the lower drawer of his dresser." (WR 604-605, 622) The police officers who searched the room did not indicate on the police property list that discarded trousers and shirt were found there. The police did not volunteer information on that point and the Commission did not attempt to elicit such information. Nevertheless, the Commission asserts on the strength of Mrs. Bledsoe's testimony and the bus transfer found on Oswald that "although Oswald... claimed to have changed his shirt, the evidence indicates that he continued wearing the same shirt he was wearing all morning and which he was still wearing when arrested." (WR 124-125)

(Sylvia Meagher, Accessories after the fact, p. 80)

521 Who asked Jolly West to 'study' Jack Ruby's mental state?


Related:
148 June Cobb's communications with FBN
455 Most of the CIA's mind-control-related files

    West emerged from Ruby's cell to announce that the previously sane inmate
                had undergone "an acute psychotic break"


Ruby returned to jail after a psychiatric evaluation, Januari 1964. (AP Photo / Ferd Kaufman).

According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter - published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins's and again involving Lawrence Schiller - Ruby "lost [his] senses" when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had pinned him to the floor, and he had no memory of what he'd just done. "What am I doing here?" he asked. "What are you guys jumping on me for?" A psychiatric analyses solicited by Ruby's defense attorneys said he'd suffered "a 'fugue state' with subsequent amnesia."

(...)

Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald's murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of "experts in behavior problems" to weigh in on Ruby's mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching judge Joe B. Brown, who'd impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn't revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive too. Three documents among his papers said he'd been "asked" by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown "a few days after the assassination," a fact never before made public.

The judge turned him down. For the moment, it seemed, West would be getting nowhere near Ruby, who was soon convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Ruby was reportedly unmoored by the news. (...) He fired his attorney and hired Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist with a law degree who'd assisted in the trial, to represent him on appeal.

(...)


Hubert Winston Smith (1907-1971)

Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby's legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one cadidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West. (...) Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his "highly qualified" skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the truth serum, sodium pentothal" to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (...)

And so, on April 26, 1964, West boarded a plane bound for Dallas. He was scheduled to examine Jack Ruby in the countyjail that afternoon. The Dallas papers reported it in their final editions that evening: West emerged from Ruby's cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone "an acute psychotic break" sometime during the preceding "forty-eight hours." Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses.

(Tom O'Neill, Chaos, p. 377-379)




Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West (October 6, 1924 – January 2, 1999) was an American psychiatrist whose work focused particularly on cases where subjects were "taken to the limits of human experience". In 1954, at the age of 29 and with no previous tenure-track appointment, he became a full professor and chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. From 1969 to 1989, he served as chair of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.

West was deeply involved in Korean War-era CIA brainwashing experiments, the Agency's notorious MK-Ultra mind-control program, and the use and intentional abuse of LSD (as it being administered to unwitting people, who then suffered traumatic hallucinations) and other drugs, precipitating the purportedly accidental death of an elephant who had been administered LSD and unspecified tranquilizers in a 1962 experiment. After completing a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California while on leave from Oklahoma during the 1966–1967 academic year, he "led a group of researchers to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where they rented an apartment and studied the hippie culture" during the latter half of 1967 under a contract funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, later confirmed to be a CIA front. He also performed a disputed psychiatric evaluation of Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby that applied several procedures delineated in his MK-Ultra research.

(Wikipedia, retrieved 2-17-22)