Chapter 2

"BOMBSHELLS"

The first attention Donahue drew to himself was in a pair of Sunday magazine articles in The Baltimore Sun. They were written by a Sun reporter, Ralph Reppert. I quote what Donahue says about them and about me in full for reasons that will become apparent:

The news that Hickey was out there somewhere was encouraging. Presumably he was in the Baltimore-Washington area. Maybe there was a way to get his address. Reppert made a note to check with his police sources on the off chance they could locate the agent's home.

As far as the alleged legal threat went, neither Donahue nor Reppert gave it much thought. If Hickey was serious about setting the record straight, he knew where to find them. Until and unless the evidence surfaced that conclusively destroyed the theory, Donahue and Reppert were in full agreement. Work on the book would continue.

In fact, Donahue had long believed there might just be that kind of evidence -- evidence that would instantly wreck his conclusions or, alternatively, prove them beyond a reasonable doubt -- if he could only get his hands on it. For years he'd seen references to spectrographic tests conducted by the FBI on the bullet fragments recovered from the scene of the crime. Spectrography is a process that involves incinerating tiny samples of the specimen in question and then comparing the color of the flames produced to those of known chemical/metallic standards.

Since there were very likely significant differences in the metallic composition of the 6.5 Carcano and .223 AR-15 bullet jackets, Donahue reasoned that spectrographic comparison of the jacket material from Kennedy's brain would show conclusively whether the bullet that had killed the President came from a Carcano or an AR-15.

The curious thing was, the spectrographic results were not included anywhere in the Warren Report or in the Commission's volumes of evidence. And FBI spectrographer John Gallagher, although he testified about tests done on the President's clothes, was never questioned about tests done on the bullet fragments. To Donahue, these omissions seemed bizarre, given the importance of the information to the Commission's lone-gunman thesis.

Reppert figured there had to be a way to get at the test data and to that end he contacted noted Warren Commission critic and assassination investigator Harold Weisberg, the Frederick, Maryland-based author of the Whitewash series. Weisberg had some startling news. Beginning in 1967, he said, he'd peppered the Justice Department with requests for a number of assassination-related documents, including the spectrographic analysis results. Weisberg eventually filed a lawsuit under the newly instituted Freedom of Information Act aimed at recovering the test data. Government attorneys responded by arguing that revelation of the test results was not in the "national interest," though they never explained why.

Eventually, though, the Justice Department relented and released several documents that they asserted were responsive to Weisberg's demands. Unfortunately, the only information from the spectrographic tests included in these papers were unidentified, partial, and therefore meaningless numerical notations made during the procedure.

Then in 1973 a bombshell detonated in the form of a previously unknown letter from J. Edgar Hoover to J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel for the Warren Commission. The letter, dated July 8, 1964, revealed that in addition to spectrographic analysis, another kind of test had been conducted on the bullet fragments. This was an extraordinarily precise and, at the time, relatively new procedure known as neutron activation. The process involves irradiating organic or inorganic materials -- in this case the bullet fragments -- with nuclear particles. The specimens would then emit gamma rays, which could be counted and compared, and analyzed to reveal the exact composition of the substance to parts per billion. The process was and remains vastly superior to spectrographic analysis and is so accurate it is often referred to as "nuclear fingerprinting."1

My first knowledge of these articles was through a lengthy story about them by the Associated Press. It appeared in our local morning paper May 9, 1977. Before then I'd never heard of or from Howard Donahue, directly or indirectly.

AP quotes him as passing off the fact that with all the people looking at the motorcade not one saw any agent fire any shot with Donahue's false statement that the bodies of the other agents in that follow-up car "shielded" Hickey. That was not true.

There was nothing behind him. Hickey sat on the back seat of the open car. The bodies of the agents on both side of him did not make a solid wall. Not only could and did people see Hickey clearly, he is in countless pictures, including some that Donahue cites. That cars had running-boards and it was a long car. Two agents standing an each running board took up only a small part of each one. Hickey was seen around the bodies of those agents.

He was not "shielded" from human eyes or from camera lenses. If he had been, how could those people Donahue says saw him stand up and then fall backward have seen him stand or seen him fall?

But if you are a Donahue with what a publisher believes he can make money from, such questions are not asked and such proof of what he said is ignored.

Again, in the effort to make the case he was making up out of nothing at all, Donahue lied. That was the only way he could seem to make his case, the case that does not exist.

Firearms expert that he boasts he is, the story, quoting what Reppert wrote in the Sun, has Donahue saying the weapon Hickey had and allegedly used was not an AR-15 but was an M-16. Donahue said they looked much alike. So much for the diligent nature of that boasted-of Donahue "investigation" when a decade and a half after all the essential information was made publicly available by the government he insists on an incorrect identification of the weapon that is without exception referred to and testified to by all who knew of it as what in the end Donahue admits it was, an AR-15.

But in his own bragging it was eight years after the beginning of what he refers to and may well still believe was an investigation, and with the indispensability of that weapon in what he was making up, Donahue was insisting on an incorrect identification of it -- eight years after it was fully, publicly and correctly identified in all those records the government made public and were accessible to him.

He is, as he says often enough, an expert in an area in which others are not expert.

Displaying his persistent and determined ignorance of the available information after all this time had passed Donahue is quoted as saying that "there is one bit of evidence which could go along way or disproving" his theory: FBI spectrographic tests of bullet fragments from Kennedy's head. The tests could show whether one or more type of bullet hit the President. "The tapes have been hidden away in a secret location, Donahue said."

If there were any "tapes" then generated by spectrographic analysis I saw no mention of them in any of the many FBI records I have read or in any of the extensive literature on the subject I studied in preparation for that litigation in which I did provide attestations under oath and subject to the charge of perjury if I lied.

Tapes are made in NAAs and. despite what Donahue says they were disclosed to me by two agencies, by the successor to the AEC as well as by the FBI.

This — and not this alone — seems to make it clear that when Donahue needs evidence he just makes it up, considering himself that much of an expert on anything and everything.

Some of my files may be incomplete because of the number of people who over the years

have had access to them. It may well be that Reppert first phoned me. My recollection, which after all these years could well be undependable, is that earlier I phoned a Sun reporter I knew. Whether or not I did, my file does show that Reppert did phone me. Having been misinformed by Donahue he was misinformed about the nature of the records the FBI had for which I had filed suit for the second time. A letter I wrote on May 13, 1977 to Paul Hoch, a west-coast physicist friend who worked at the Lawrence-Livermore laboratory, states that "I offered him [Reppert] all I obtained and I offered to let the Sun join in my suit." Reppert said he was off the coming week. He indicated he might come up, I invited him and Donahue both. They did not come.

In 1992 Donahue wrote, as we saw above, that to get the FBI's spectrographic data Reppert got in touch with me. I offered it all to him, invited him up, and he never came. (It was eight years before Donahue came, as we see.)

Reppert wrote me under date May 16, 1977. He sent me copies of both of those puff pieces on Donahue that he wrote, dated May 1 and May 8, and said, "Our attorneys are seeking, like you, to obtain access to the complete FBI ballistics evidence." He said nothing about accepting any of my offers and in the end he accepted none of them. None includes not even taking a peek at what I'd gotten from the FBI and again, not from it alone.

In my reply of May 18 I noted he had said nothing about coming up and seemed to have changed his mind on that. I also told him that if he were to write further there was other relevant information I had he'd be welcome to, including pictures and the information I had obtained under "discovery" in the litigation. I said, "Whatever course the Sun elects it is still welcome to copies of all I obtained." I also told him that the FBI had had neutron activation analyses (NAAs) on some of the evidence. Donahue was quoted on spectrographic examinations only and he is quoted as confusing the results of the two radically different kinds of tests. Reflecting his knowledge of them from his touted expertise, no doubt.

On May 24 I had a phone call from a Sun Washington bureau reporter asking the status of my second lawsuit for that information.

I never heard from the Sun about that again.

I did not hear from Donahue until 1985.

Or, he and Reppert were really anxious to learn what they could about those FBI tests and the results of those tests!

What I offered Donahue and the Sun in inviting it to join in my lawsuit is not of no consequence if there it had any interest in getting the information as rapidly as possible.

First of all, it would not, as with a new lawsuit, have gone to the end of the backlog of cases before that court. My case was already before a judge and the Sun would have been there with me, automatically.

There then was the question of costs. Not that the Sun could not afford them better than I, but I was already bearing those costs. It could have meant the newspaper which, without its other holdings, was a multi-million dollar property, would have had no costs it did not elect to assume.

For all his bragging about the diligence of his investigation, neither Donahue nor Reppert knew that the FOIA lawsuit then before the federal district court in Washington was my second FOIA lawsuit for those test results.

Donahue's knowledge of the field was such that he refers so long after the second lawsuit was over only to the first of that pair of lawsuits. And he had no idea of who was sued or for what, despite the pretensions of what he told Menninger and Menninger wrote about his hero Donahue.

The FBI's corruption in that first FOIA lawsuit for those test results was so great that in 1974, when the Congress amended FOIA, that particular lawsuit was cited as requiring the amending of what is known as the investigatory files exemption to make FBI, CIA and similar records accessible under the Act. The FBI had misused my first of these two cases to in effect rewrite the law in court to claim it was not within the Act.

If Donahue had really made the investigation he boasts about so often he would have known that there were two suits and that the second of those two suits was the first under it filed anywhere after the Act was amended. He would also have known, as the Congressional Record of May 30, 1974 makes clear, that of all the members of the United States Senate the one who saw to it that the legislative history would be clear and unequivocal, the one who identified my first lawsuit as requiring the amending then before the Senate, was the sole surviving Kennedy brother, Senator Edward M. "Teddy" Kennedy.2

In the first lawsuit I sought the relevant records of the FBI only. In, the second lawsuit, as after his diligent investigation Donahue did not report, I also sued the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), successor to the Atomic Energy Commission. I also added to that lawsuit the results of neutron activation analyses (NAAs) that were made for the FBI at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, by ERDA's contractor, Union Carbide.

Scholar that he is, in his own description, anyway, Donahue did not know that I also sued ERDA, that the FBI did not perform the tests itself, and although I had offered him and Reppert full access to all I obtained, which included what I had obtained under discovery, neither cared and neither ever took a look or even asked that I make copies for them.

With this peek at what for Donahue and in his account of it is a diligent and exhaustive inquiry we return to excerpts from what is quoted from his book above

He and Reppert claim they did not give much thought to "the alleged legal threat" they could have faced from Hickey. Worry? What was there to worry about? All they did was call the innocent Hickey a murderer, an assassin, a Presidential assassin at that. Hell, that is everyday, isn't it? So what was there to worry about?

However, after the Menninger book was out, it was unfortunate for Hickey that he delayed filing suit as long as he did because of psychological problems he faced that without doubt, Donahue, Reppert, The Sun, and Menninger contributed to after the first story by Reppert. It got widespread attention and hurt Hickey. There were ample grounds for suit and in the end Hickey did file suit against St. Martin's. Even if, all-knowing as Donahue is, as Menninger put it, "neither Donahue nor Reppert gave it much thought." As of this writing the not inconsiderable costs to St. Martin's of this litigation continue and will continue.

"Until and unless the evidence surfaced [sic] that conclusively destroyed the theory, Donahue and Reppert" would continue working on the book begun by them. (I am impelled to interject here that referring to that proven impossibility — and we see it was that — as a theory is like describing the belief that the world is flat is a theory. It is Donahue and his hired hack puffing his outrage up and puffing him up with it.)

There was no volcano to "surface" evidence. That evidence did exist and it was the responsibility of Donahue and then Reppert, later Menninger, to know all the relevant evidence. However, the record is clear despite his big talk about being even-handed Donahue looked only for what he could interpret as or contort into seeming to support his invented "solution." The truth is they both knew about the actual evidence and ignored it because they believed Hickey would not sue.

"For years" Donahue "had seen references to spectrographic tests conducted by the FBI on bullet fragments recovered from the scene of the crime," he says. His source note refers to one page of a paperback reprint of my first book on the assassination, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report.3

Again, as any legitimate scholar knows, it is the original source that authentic scholars use for their citations if it is available — and there was never been a time when all of the books I published were not available. If Donahue did not want to take the less than exhausting drive of not much more than an hour, he could have written or telephoned me and used the original.

It and the reprint are indexed and there are more references to those spectrographic analyses in it than this single first mention of it that Donahue cites.

I am not an expert on spectrographic analysis but my understanding is not as Donahue says: the specimen is "incinerated" and that is followed by "comparing the color of the flames produced." Each of the objects tested creates a unique flame and identification is by that flame.

(When in CA 75-226, we deposed the FBI's spectrographer, SA John F. Gallagher, he testified that the specimen needed may weigh as little as a postage-stamp and can be as tiny as a square millimeter. Incinerating is not often applied to burning anything so tiny. The test is fine to parts per million and that is a pretty fine test.)

Donahue here and throughout assumes, without offering a shred of proof, that bullet jacket material was recovered from the President's head. For most bullets, the bulk of its weight is not jacket material but lead. Every specimen recovered was identified by the FBI with a series of unique identifiers, beginning with the identification given it by the laboratory. Each object in the Commission's evidence is identified by its exhibit or file number. As he rambles along feigning expertise Donahue does not provide a single one of these readily available and unique identifiers for the specimens he says were tested and of which he says the results would be conclusive and would make his case that Hickey was the President's assassin.

This Donahue citation is to the one mention of spectrographic analysis on that page. Later in that first book of mine and my later books there is ever so much more about these analyses.

"The curious thing was, the spectrographic results were not included anywhere in the Warren Report or in the Commission's volumes of evidence," Donahue says. Whether or not this is true depends on how one defines "results," as Donahue and Menninger do not. If Donahue meant only what he neither says nor even suggests, a full tabulation at one point of all the results of all the spectrographic examinations made in the case, then what he says is true. "Results" abound in the Commission's volumes and that they do is indicated in the latter references to spectrographic analyses in that very first of the Whitewash series. Those "results" are in the testimony of FBI agents.

If Donahue had merely turned the page of the reprint he would have seen what is quoted from the original,4 just one of the many paragraphs of testimony to the "results " of the FBI's spectrographic testing. The witness was Robert Frazier, FBI lab agent:

Frazier testified at length and with the care that is appropriate for an FBI expert (5H59ff).). He identified the point in the President's clothing represented by the President's "neck" wound at 5⅜ inches below the top of the collar of the jacket (5H59) and at 5¾ inches below the top of the collar on the shirt (5H60). Spectrographic analysis of the margins of these holes showed "traces of copper," proved to be foreign to the cloth. This is at least strongly indicative, if not positive proof, that the bullet making this hole was copper-jacketed, and this, in turn, is indicative of the type of the bullet. But about the Governor's clothing, Frazier testified to its cleansing. For this reason, he could not identify the holes even as bullet holes, could not testify to the course of the bullet or anything about it "because of the cleaning and pressing." Frazier indicated that with the Governor's clothing, because of the large size of the holes, he might have been able to indicate whether the holes were caused by mutilated bullets (5H63-6).

This brief quotation is selected of the many more in that first volume and the ever so many more in my later books because it is closest to the one mention of the word Donahue cites. To most people this Frazier testimony and more so later quotations do include "results."

Next Donahue says what makes one wonder if he even read what he cites. He says, "FBI spectrographer John Gallagher, although he testified about the tests done on the President's clothes, was never questioned about tests done on the bullet fragments."5

Gallagher was the very last witness called by the Commission's assistant counsel Norman Redlich. Gallagher testified on September 15, 1964. The solo purpose of his testimony, which is in Volume 15, pages 746-752, was to close a very large loophole the Commission had in its case

against Oswald, the case that except for the fatal wound Donahue accepts without any question at all.

The sole purpose of Gallagher's last-minute testimony was to get him to say what is also a special interpretation, that paraffin tests made to determine whether a suspect has fired a weapon or not are dependable. That was all he was asked about! He was not asked a single question about "tests done on the President's clothes" and he did not volunteer any information about that — even though he was the spectrographer who made those spectrographic examinations.

He was called in the last minute, after the Report was written and had been set in type because the paraffin tests made of Oswald's cheek by the Dallas police was negative. It established that he had not fired a rifle!

The key testimony that clearly Donahue did not ever look at is on page 750 of Volume 15 of the Commission's Appendix. There Commission Assistant Counsel Norman Redlich asked Gallagher if the reason "this test is considered unreliable for purposes of determining whether or not someone had fired a weapon is the fact that elements which react to the reagents in the paraffin are found in a variety of common substances . . ."

Gallagher agreed.

The only "unreliability" in the paraffin tests is for conviction!

Other substances can leave deposits picked up by the paraffin. Some soaps, for example. Also with Oswald, printed matter, which he handled all the time. Thus it was that when those paraffin tests were positive on his hands they could not be used to convict him.

Gallagher was not asked about this — and volunteered nothing about it.

But tile absence of these deposits is exculpatory!

Blowback onto the cheek from firing a rifle is picked up by the paraffin. There was no deposit an Oswald's cheek as would have been left if he had fired a rifle!

It was only for hoking up this phony excuse for the Commission to ignore the results of those police paraffin tests that, after the Commission had finished its work, after it had its Report written, and after that Report was set in type that Gallagher was called to help the Commission phony up its case against Oswald by his emergency closing of that loophole.

Gallagher was not called to testify about "tests on the President's clothes" and if Donahue had even read what he cites in this Shylockery with his pretended Sherlockery he would have known it and not told this massive lie in his account of his allegedly exhaustive investigation that he thinks so much of it licenses him to be critical of all others.

Next in what we quoted was how Reppert figured they could get the results of the testing from me and then neither he nor Donahue made the slightest effort to do that, close as I lived to both of them.

How little they knew even of what from his account Donahue read is revealed in the statement that I "eventually filed a lawsuit" under FOIA.

Long before Reppert's articles appeared the Act had been amended, as recounted above. The first of these two suits, in the opinion of the Senate, requiring the amending of the Act. It was and was passed over the veto of former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, the unelected President, and although the Government could and did stonewall that lawsuit and avoided full compliance, it nonetheless, before those Reppert articles, appeared and under the second of those particular lawsuits had coughed up what Donahue says does not exist.

An illustration of why no serious writer on the assassination, no self-respecting subject-matter authority, no genuine investigator would cite Jim Marr's book6 is what Donahue attributes to him: "Government attorneys responded [to my lawsuit] arguing that revelation of the test results was not in the 'national interest'."

Aside from the argument by the government's lawyer to the judge in that case in which he alleged that the determination of against "national interest" had been made by the attorney general, which we later proved was a lie because he had made no such determination, those government attorneys provided an FBI affidavit in which, under oath, that agent did specify how he said the FBI would be harmed by the disclosure of the results of the scientific testing.

So again Donahue lied. I say this, not that he made a mistake, because all of this is published and is in facsimile in the books he should have that I published. Those are the books he should have if he is going to write on this subject in any event.

Donahue has and cites my Post Mortem7. In it I go into further detail on the government's shenanigans to frustrate, really to violate the law. If Donahue had read the book and if he had the proper approach of both the scholar and the investigator he would have used the original and accurate source. And not continue to make a fool of himself by quoting a fellow subject-matter ignoramus as an authority when he had the original source, the original authority.

Those FBI agents also lied.

It is the corruption of all this, including the federal attorney lying to the judge, that led to the particular amending of the Act referred to above.

Skipping a little because not doing that would make an interminable book, Donahue refers to an alleged "bombshell" he says "detonated in the form of a previously unknown letter" that J. Edgar Hoover wrote the Commission. That was, in the Donahue rewriting of history and flaunting of his ignorance of the subject-matter, the first knowledge anyone had that neutron activation analysis tests had been made.

The only "bombshell" should be under Donahue and his hired hack Menninger because in the very Gallagher testimony cited above which they lied, saying it was related to the President's clothing, Gallagher told the Commission that there had been activation testing!

That was not in 1973, as Donahue says, quoting the same page of Marr's mishmash of misinformation.8 It was in 1964, and if was published by the Commission that very year. In those very volumes Donahue was too much the cheapskate to buy, own and study,

For example, and this is Gallagher's testimony, "Neutron activation analyses were conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory."9 He identified the scientists who worked on that as Dr. Frank P. Dwyer and Mr. J. F. Emery.10

When one makes and plants such "bombshells" as Donahue and his like do, they have to run like hell not to be blown up with their "bombshells." They would not think of if they had only done work that is the minimum necessity for responsible writing on this subject.

No matter how rapidly he can fire a rifle, Donahue does not know the disclosed, official evidence, what if he had taken the time to read and had not been too cheap to buy the Report and those twenty-six volumes of its Appendix, he would have read in them what he accused the Commission of having kept secret for a decade thereafter.

This supposed "bombshell" is the only part of what blows up Donahue and his wretched, disgusting, totally baseless and defamatory accusation of a completely innocent Secret Service agent George Hickey as being the actual Presidential assassin. How Donahue contrives that fabrication that he alone made up out of nothing at all is another of his self-created "bombshells."