Chapter 9

"Red" Is Not Red

How little Brown has learned on his own, from his own work, that has any meaning and how little of this he has picked up from the work of others is clear as he begins his Chapter Four, The Spy Who Came Back From the Cold (page 224-34).

In his chapter title he says Oswald was a spy but not for whom. And to this point he has not produce a shred of evidence to prove it. Making things up as he does, he misses a fine opportunity. He says that Spas T. Raikin from a relief organization, the name of which he does not know, met the Oswalds, that Raikin's outfit "fronted for intelligence operations," whatever than can mean, and that "Oswald grew quickly tired of his company and headed for Texas (page 225). What else Brown expected Oswald to do but keep his costs in New York to the minimum when he had no reason to stay there is not clear. Nor is there any indication that there was any connection between Oswald and Raikin other than Raikin's function to provide help to travelers. In the same sentence Brown adds, after saying that Oswald headed for Texas, "making a stopover in Atlanta that has prompted sinister questions . . ."

That Atlanta stopover was because that was the transportation arranged for the Oswalds and they did not leave the airport. The "sinister questions" are not because of the brief moments the Oswalds were at the Atlanta airport, other than by those who prefer theories and suspicions to fact. As the sentence continues Brown gets to what he has heard or remembers reading without an understanding of it or knowing more. ". . . as the Oswalds had met a Captain Davidson [sic] in the USSR who had a family in Atlanta and had been in contact with espionage agent Oleg Penkovsky prior to his execution by the Soviets" (page 285).

Captain Alexis Davison was in the Air Force. He was attached to the Moscow embassy as a doctor. He did not "meet" Penkovsky, who had been a major Cold War intelligence success of the CIA despite its best efforts to prevent that. Penkovsky's was a show trial, well reported. Davison was caught by the Soviets servicing a "dead drop" in which Penkovsky left intelligence information for the United States. (A dead drop as a place, not a person, where information is left by prearrangement to be picked up. Like a hole in a particular tree of wall.)

What Brown does not know and does not say is that the Oswald-Davison connection was, I learned, separate from the Penkovsky trial. (Davison was then expelled by the USSR) It was learned from the Oswald's pocket address book. In it he had Davison's mother's name and address, given to him by Davison.

Davison was one of the sons of a doctor who immediately after World War I was part of the United States Army that, along with the armies of five other countries, invaded the just- established USSR with the intent of throwing that government out. They all failed. While serving in our Army there he met a Russian nurse. She was as anti-Soviet as one could be. She was a nurse in the so-called "White" army of the defeated Russian General Wrangel. They married and she returned to the United States with him. They settled where he came from.

All the Davisons were strongly anti-Soviet, not only their mother and father. In the sham of an investigation of this the FBI reported a brother at the Columbia School of Russian Relations.

What has meaning in all of this that Brown did not understand is that with his strongly anti-Soviet background an beliefs, Captain Davison, while in our Moscow embassy, suggested to Oswald that he look the mother up. Anti-Soviet as his mother was, Davison would never have dreamed of sending Oswald to see her if he were not confident that rather than being the "red" of Brown's Red Patsy, Oswald was ant-red in the sense Brown uses the word. In turn this means that our embassy also was aware of what Oswald's actual political beliefs were. If Davison had not been confident of that he would never have offended his aging mother by sending a pro-Soviet Oswald to see her.

This, of course, is not the Oswald of the official portrayal or of Brown's.

It is also the Oswald portrayed in the information Nosenko gave to the FBI and what I published in 1975. The KGB's Minsk records stated clearly that Oswald was anti-Soviet while he was still in the Soviet Union.

If Brown had not been under the spell of his belief in his special genius, he might have wondered whether the forgoing, which is not in the Commission's record, was one of the unspoken reasons the CIA had for talking the Commission out of taking testimony from Nosenko or mentioning a thing he told the FBI and the CIA.

With Brown's love of conjecture he represents as fact, could he have had a time with this!

From this, Brown gets to fantasizing about George de Mohrenschildt (his spelling, not Brown's) and with his fantasies adopting and enlarging on the fantasies and inventions of others.

De Mohrenschildt, and his then wife, were both anti-Soviet and refugees because the Communists took over. There was a White-Russian community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Oswald was desperately poor and Marina and their daughter showed it. The community pitched in to help them out. Most of those contacts had to do with this help, as when de Mohrenschildt's wife sent over her clothes and then took some to Marina.

De Mohrenschildt was himself a rather off-beat character. He found that White Russian community rather stodgy. He also found Oswald a bit unusual. He found Oswald's story interesting. Along with the others who imagine that de Mohrenschildt was a CIA agent, as he was not, Brown lets his conjectures run wild in writing that de Mohrenschildt was:

eager to help Jim get out the story of his time in Russia. Some might call such an activity a "debriefing" (Brown's emphasis, page 226).

Some might call such writing childish and silly, which it is.

The CIA could have debriefed Oswald clandestinely or openly. There was no need to do that clandestinely, not for a debriefing, and openly it had its Domestic Contact Service which openly interviewed those returning from the USSR. J. Walton Moore, the man in charge of that in that area, had debriefed de Mohrenschildt on his returns from abroad and in fact they had a friendly relationship. Were there to be any Oswald debriefing, there was no need to keep it secret and Moore would have done it.

Certainly a geologist was not the person to debrief an Oswald. Debriefing is not bull- sessioning. It requires knowledge of what is and is not valuable information, of the kind that is and is not wanted or needed, what any special interests are and among other things, how to go about a debriefing.

From all of this beginning with Davison, Brown has no source note. Then his notes for the alleged confirmation of all of this nonsense about de Mohrenschildt are to the Nagell baloney. In short, he has no real source for any of it.

Continuing the fantasizing on his own, Brown describes Oswald as "the local major domo of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee" (page 227).

There was no Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans.

Oswald became a member of the national organization by sending it five dollars. That is his only connection and it is a connection anyone could have had. He did not represent it in any way and, in fact, when he wrote it what he planed to do they told him not to.

But if there had ever been anything other than childishness in Brown's mind he might have wondered what interest Oswald served in what he was up to in New Orleans. If his own mind, especially considering what he tries to do in this book and is referring to Oswald as the Red Patsy, was not capable of seeing any possible meaning in it, he read Whitewash of thirty years earlier that Oswald's career in New Orleans is consistent with what, in intelligence is called, a cover.

As he continues blowing second-hand and third-hand smoke, Brown drags in the name and says of it, "Charles Harrison is a frequent suspect in assassination literature" (page 227). He gives no source. There was a time when he sometimes said to be one of those Dealey Plaza tramps. That, however, was conjecture and it was false, now proven by the actual records and interviews of those men.

Still with no source, Brown next says that Oswald used "space provided by Guy Banister, a familiar character in the New Orleans scenario." Banister, a former FBI agent, had a two bit private detective agency. He was of the extreme right. There is no reason to believe he and Oswald ever saw each other. It is an unreferenced lie to say that Banister provided space for Oswald to use — space for which Oswald did not even have any imagined need (page 227). As Brown gets into the stratosphere on this fabrication, he accused officialdom of "an unwillingness to consider the possibility that Guy Banister gave marching orders of silence about Dallas" (page 227). There is no sense or reason to this at all but, if there were, the reader would have to be given proof of any meaning or interpretation. Brown does not.

Brown slides into an incompetent, inaccurate rehash of the Oswald handbill being printed by the Jones Printing Co. Brown says that "is opposite the side entrance of Reiley Coffee," where Oswald worked briefly. It "is" not there and it was not "opposite" that entrance. Before being torn down for area redevelopment it was on the other side of that street. Brown says that neither Douglas Jones, the owner, nor Myra Silver, his employee "could" identify Oswald as the man who picked that print job up. While that alone might be expected to set the endless conjectures rolling, where it should have, it does not. I interviewed both and both were firm in stating that the man who picked up those handbills was definitely not Oswald. In the course of all of this, Brown adds an employees to the Jones Printing Company it did not have. He says that "J. I. Anderton identified Oswald but claimed the order was for five hundred handbills." Anderton was with the company that printed Oswald's phony Free Play for Cuba Committee membership application forms (page 228).

Missing no opportunity to make his subject-matter ignorance clear, Brown next refers to Oswald's distribution of that handbill "where sailors were coming off the U.S.S. Wasp." He says of this, "Oswald seemed to have a death wish." This is unexplained and there is no more about it. He then complains that the Navy claimed to have no information on that.

Brown does not ask, if Oswald had had any earlier connection with that carrier, the kind of ship Brown does not say it was. And here again, where he could have, as with Jones, made a case that Oswald was not alone, that subject-matter ignorance rushes to the fore. The harbor police took a copy of the handbill from the man passing them out. It filed that sheet of paper and forgot about it until the assassination. It then gave it to the FBI. The FBI fingerprinted it and returned it to New Orleans with the report that those were not Oswald's prints. New Orleans was incurious about he man who gave those handbills out for Oswald. The FBI never disclosed whose prints they are (page 228).

Avoiding the date, which refutes his opening words, Brown then writes that "Not long after" this Wasp picketing "Oswald struck up an extremely brief friendship with Carlos Bringuier" about whom Brown manages to say nothing else. In fact there was no such "friendship" and at a time not indicated by Brown, Bringuier gave Oswald the publicity he sought in what Brown does not mention, his provoking of Bringuier, then Bringuier and two others assaulted Oswald while he was handing those handbills out on, as Brown also does not say, Canal Street (page 228).

Brown knows nothing about and understands nothing about that literature distribution but here, as elsewhere, that presents him with no problems and as in this instance is also a lie: ". . . Oswald managed to get photographed at virtually every (however brief) stop on his leaflet tour [sic]. Odd" (page 229).

There was nothing like a "tour." Oswald was concentrated in the few blocks in which he had the best chance of provoking Bringuier. He was there often. He was much more active in this time than the Commission or the FBI ever acknowledged. But as my own investigation made clear, confirmed by official records, the one time he "managed to get photographed," he arranged for himself. Then two TV stations showed up. At the time Bringuier and his cronies assaulted Oswald, two visitors with 8-mm movie cameras got pictures of it that are not in the official records (page 229).

There is more such silliness that we will skip, this being enough for now. But I do note again Brown's use of the work of another, again my work, as his own where he says in getting his passport in New Orleans that he used to get a Mexican visa, the State Department list of all that days New Orleans applications "had the notation 'no' next to his name." I published that State teletype in facsimile in, again 1965, in Whitewash, on page 200. There the NO is visible in large capital letters.

That was the only "no" on that entire list. Therefore, Oswald got his passport overnight. Others did not.

Suspicious Brown had no suspicions of that.

One of the very many reasons I believe Brown was never the FBI agent he told me he was in his ignorance of the FBI procedures where he refers to a report by New Orleans FBI agent Milton Kaack: "Basing his conclusions on confidential informant T-7 . . ." The FBI has no such identification of its confidential informants, to whom it refers as "symbol informants." When it believes a record may be distributed, even within the FBI, it replaces the actual identifications with arbitrary numbers beginning with a "T." It uses a separate final sheet or sheets that are removed on distribution. It provides Headquarters with the correct identification of each source or informant used. Depending on how many reports he wrote on any given day, Kaack or any other agent could have a dozen or more different "T-7 identifications" (page 235).

Brown's chapter title is "The Spy Who Came Back from the Cold." He has not a thing in this chapter leading to the belief that Oswald was anyone's spy and as we have seen, where he could have asked questions or made suggestions that were valid, he did not as he remains mired in the assassination mythologies.

In his Chapter Five, which he titles for no reason apparent after reading it, The Man with the Wooden Gun, among other things Brown rehashes what was first brought to light in Whitewash, and referred to as "The False Oswald," some of the appearances of those said to have been Oswald when they could not have been the real Oswald (pages 235-45). In the course of this he manages to slander Ruth Paine for no legitimate reason. She was studying Russian but she was not pro-Soviet. She and her husband were Quakers. She took Marina in when Marina needed help and hoped to improve her Russian with Marina. "She also got Russian magazines at her home but said they were for Oswald," Brown's words. He then says, nothing omitted in quoting him,

"If true - and there was the usual cross section of Soviet literary flotsam at the Paine residence - the enigma is deepened" (page 236).

If Brown had any reason at all to doubt her word, he does not even suggest he does. He merely asks to begin with "If true" and then writes what has by itself no meaning other than to slander her, "there was the usual cross section of Soviet literary flotsam at the Paine residence," whatever than mean. But it certainly does suggest!

(Expert on anything and everything that he is, Brown is also an authority on Soviet literary matters. For him that requires no knowledge of the literature. Without knowing what it is he knows it as "flotsam.")

That Marina read no English, Brown does not mention in suggesting the "enigma" of Oswald not getting these magazines at his post office box.

As with Brown's deliberate lying about the McCone affidavit gone into above, there are other occasions on which there is a question about Brown's knowledge of those twenty-six volumes he presents as his specialty along with other questions about his intentions. Without getting to any wooden gun he writes:

The Warren Commission also published a hoax letter that told that Oswald, while in Mexico, received $7,000 from a Cuban to kill President Kennedy" (page 241).

I knew the Commission had published no such letter and I knew of a transparent hoax in Mexico by a Nicaraguan intelligence agent who hoped to get World War III started with that hoax, so I checked Brown's source note, to Commission Exhibit 2763 at 26 H 148. Sure enough, that exhibit is not that "hoax letter and it does not mention any $7,000 for doing the job. It is the December 12, 1963 letter that Hoover sent to the State Department about several fake letters mailed in Cuba and signed by one "Pedro Charles" that had been intercepted. "Charles" hints at having paid Oswald to do the job. But he mentions no sum or Mexico.

Is it not strange that with this flair for conjecturing and his bent for asking questions he wants to be taken as statements of fact that Brown does not wonder why anyone in Cuba would write such letters, or even whether in doing that they served some special interest? Or agency?

From the recesses of Brown's mixed-up memory and without looking at what this Hoover letter says he just cites it as his source for his obvious misstatement.

The Nicaraguan agent who sought to get the war going with his amateurish fabrication was Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte. His story was that when he was in the courtyard of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City he saw a black, red-headed Cuban agent give Oswald $6,500 to kill Kennedy. The CIA hotshots down there and Ambassador Thomas Mann, anxious to do something about Castro, leaned on Washington to do something with this transparent fake as their basis. The FBI was worried and pressured for Alvarado to be grilled and polygraphed. He admitted he had made it all up.

At least in this case, Brown had a confused recollection of something he had heard of somewhere to which he could give his phony source note. More often he lacks even this little.

At the bottom of this same page, Brown writes that "when Oswald was visited in custody was visited by ACLU officials eager to help him, Oswald told them he did not feel he was in need of their legal services" (pages 241-2). That there is no source note on this is not surprising. The ACLU did not get in to see Oswald. It was the President of the Dallas American Bar Association, H. Louis Nichols, that the police let see him. What the Report says on this Brown mishmash is that when on the evening of the assassination the ACLU spoke to the Dallas police and they were fobbed off by the police with false assurances. Then, on Saturday, when Nichols visited Oswald in his cell and asked him whether he wanted the association to obtain a lawyer for him. "Oswald declined the offer, stating a preference for [John] Abt [who had defended Communists in the past], and a second preference for a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union."

If it were not for the permeating sloppiness, carelessness and ignorance that typifies Brown's writing it would be impossible to believe that this is just an accidental error. Particularly when his concept of his brilliance and omniscience is unhidden.

Whatever accounts for it, Brown wrote the exact opposite of the well-known truth.

And in it missed a real opportunity to give a bit of substance to his baseless "Blue Death" invention, that the police were the assassins.

One can only wonder what would emerge if all his citations were checked!

This and "Pedro Charles" and Brown's McCone are glaring, very conspicuous.

Again seeking to have a subliminal effect to his readers he titles his chapter six, "The Hunt For Red Oswald" (pages 246-255). Except for those with special interests and for those who no better than the truth that would be a long and fruitless search. Yet for his squibs at the beginnings of his chapters, this time he has two, both raising questions about aspects of the official investigations. That is also is how Brown starts. He writes that as "Oswald exited the TSBD, pointing out the location of a pay phone to a Secret Service agent in the front of the TSBD (this alternately seen as journalist, Robert McNeil [sic] of current television fame), but if it was the timing of the event is destroyed, as McNeil [sic] performed a search of the overpass area and knoll before approaching the: by the time he got there the 'Oswald' of Warren Commission fame would already be bored with a bus ride to nowhere)" (page 247). Aside from the fact that as would be expected of reporter, MacNeil rushed into the building, he first stated and then confirmed that the man he saw was Oswald, Brown again indulges in what he regards as a sense of humor on so serious a subject, he is again showing ignorance and again is mixing up at least two stories neither of which he can cite to a legitimate source.

Something similar was reported by Pierce Allman, Program Director, of nearby WFAA- TV. And he, too, was firm in his belief that it was Oswald who directed him to a phone so he could phone the news to his station. Moreover, the Secret Service report that the Commission did not publish but is CD 354 in it records so anathematic to Brown, is headed "Pierce Allman (person believed to be one mentioned by Lee Harvey Oswald as identifying himself as Secret Service agent in Texas School Book Depository immediately following assassination) interviewed 1-29-64." At the bottom of the second page Secret Service agent Roger C. Warner, assigned to the investigation, wrote "Mr. Allman carries his press pass in a leather case similar to cases carried by Federal agents . . ." Terrence Ford, the station's promotions director, confirmed Allman. Neither said he could identify Oswald as the man who directed Allman to the phone.

With more of his conjectures of the kind that only a mind like his can conjure, Brown writes that if Oswald learned on "the bus to nowhere" what had happened, "it may have well been the "instant Oswald himself learned how deeply he was involved in something that he had not had full knowledge of even an hour before" (page 247). In this Brown begins by assuming the truth of the impossible, cockamamie, unreasonable story he just made out of nothing about Oswald's witting participation in something he did not understand. He also assumes that Oswald left the building into all that chaos, confusion and excitement without hearing a word about what had happened. More he assumes that on realization Oswald would not have fled instead of heading into a cu-de-sac in a movie theater. Referring to what Brown calls "logic" he says that it "would have dictated taking the first bus out of town" and then as though to explain away why such a person in such a position would not use a public means of getting away he writes that the same "logic" would also "have told Oswald that the police would have sealed such exits" (page 247). With more such conjectures and partial rehashes Brown finally has Oswald at his rooming house. He then writes that he "changed clothes" there which "suggests that he did not want to be recognized in the clothing he had worn that morning." That no doubt accounts for why Oswald was arrested wearing his uniquely identifiable shirt on a man standing in the doorway in the Altgens picture that was taken a fraction more than two seconds after the first shot of the official story. I have pictures of Oswald in that shirt at police headquarters and of an enlargement of that part of the Altgens picture on the inside back cover and the facing page of Whitewash II, which Brown has in his bibliography. In Whitewash II are the results of a careful examination of the shirt taken from Oswald's back. It is in the National Archives. There are unique flaws in that shirt that are faithfully duplicated in the shirt in the Altgens picture.

Still conjecturing away, Brown has Oswald in the Texas Theater, taking the word of the man who could not have seen it that Oswald had not gotten a ticket. He wanted to be conspicuous so he slipped in without paying? (Knowing that the ticket-taker would not be there to catch him?)

He had a special reason for going to that theater at that time, as Brown puts it: "It is also possible that he did not plan to stay in the theater any longer than it would take to make a prearranged contact" (page 250).

Makes sense. At least to Brown, that anybody would "prearrange" a "contact" for a time he would be at work rather than when he would not be at work.

Citing no source, Brown writes that "it is odd that the 112th Military Intelligence Group [whose name was "Army" rather than "military"] in San Antonio would be contacted to see if they had anything about a 'Hidell," and they were able to check their files and conveniently learn that 'Hidell' was cross-referenced to a Lee Henry Oswald. (The file was routinely destroyed, so it cannot be checked with precision)" (page 251).

If destroyed could it be checked at all?

Here again Brown uses the work of others as his own and characteristically he mixes it all up.

Nobody, and he does not say who, "contacted" that army domestic intelligence unit and nobody asked it for "anything about a 'Hidell'," It was not as the result of any such inquiry that "they were able to check their files and conveniently [that inevitable Brown touch] learn of any cross-referencing to any variation of Oswald's name." Paul Hoch did most of the original work on that as it happened rather than as Brown tells it.

It was as soon as Oswald's name was mentioned as the name of the man arrested that the unit checked its files. It had Oswald clippings on file, on his "defection" and return and on his staged promotions in New Orleans. It told police and it released its information.

This not being enough for the omniscient Brown, he adds:

What all this amounts to is that somehow military intelligence knew a great deal about Oswald/'Hidell' but did nothing about it and what they admitted knowing should either have caused serious concern, which it did not, in spite of Oswald's 'defection,' or it should have been ignored, which again it was not. People rent post office boxes and purchase mail-order rifles far too regularly and routinely for this to be a serious concern of military intelligence (Brown's emphasis).

In other than a police state, the ordering of a rifle is "routinely" routed to a military domestic intelligence unit?

It should have had a twenty-four hour watch on Oswald? Based on what little "it knew" about him, that he had "defected" and returned?

What to Brown is that "great deal" it knew about Oswald was a few clippings from the public press.

After more legal gobbledygook, Brown repeats that Oswald, this time he says "spurned" the ACLU and again, firmly based on his ignorance of the Commission's unpublished records, says that "the other legal opportunity that passed him by involved a telephone call to flamboyant New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews on November 23," purportedly from "Clay Bertrand . . ." (page 252).

In fact the police received and did not give Oswald a telegram to him from Chicago attorney Harold E. McDervid [sic], who offered to defend him. Chief of Homicide Will Fritz told Dallas FBI agent Richard F. Harrison the day after the assassination that the telegram had not been given to Oswald "inasmuch as Oswald had expressly requested service of JOHN ABT of New York City." Who it just happens told the press that day that he would not take the case. As this FBI report in the Commission's files continues it says another lie on Brown: "Oswald advised Captain FRITZ that he did not care to be represented by a lawyer from the Dallas Bar Association, and that if ABT was not available, desired to seek counsel from the American Civil Liberties Unit" (CD 735).

Brown refers to Harry Holmes, the Postal Inspector who questioned Oswald, as an "FBI informant," which he was not, and as the "erstwhile postal inspector," which he also was not (note 253).

In all of this, Brown, makes no mention of the fact that the post office could not come up with the receipt it was required to get when it handed that mail-order rifle over.

As he ends his continuing demonstration of his truly spectacular ignorance of the established official facts of the assassination and his ineffable inability even to crib straight, Brown refers to Oswald's protest this way: "Oswald also confessed to being a patsy (page 255).

That is something one "confesses?"

The Hunt for Red Oswald and Book Two: Red Patsy are ended.

They are followed by Book Three: White lies (pages 259-340). Those not steeped in baseball lore may not understand why Brown titles Chapter One: Hoover to Warren by Chance. Many, many years ago there was a very successful baseball double play combination. It was referred to as "Tinkers-to-Evers-Chance." He returns to this at the end of this Book with an explanation that is every bit as dependable as what we have been getting from him about the assassination, every bit as well-informed, every bit as appropriate and authoritative. He is no less the man who regards himself as knowing all there is to know about anything and everything, now including baseball. However, by the time I got around to the end of this Book, I had no better an idea about why he decided on this chapter title than when I began it. Except perhaps that he has a thing on titles some of which the reader may have perceived in the previous chapter titles. Perhaps also, as in his use of his doctorate degree, he believe it reflects what he regards as his academic and cultural achievement and stature. Class Cop.

Be patient, reader.

Here, as he continues to buffoon along undoubtedly still as impressed with himself and what he is doing and dispensing criticisms right and left with unrecognized ignorance, he goes after the Secret Service for spending any time "investigating the crime." That he says, was not its job. So "Why were they investigating?" The closest he came to answering the question is to suggest it suspected the FBI and Hoover and to ask did they "smell something very rotten?" (pages 260-1).

There is an obvious and reasonable answer to why the Secret Service was doing any investigating: to learn how better to protect presidents. It did not have to "smell something very rotten" to want to do that.

That this did not suggest itself to a man who says he had been an FBI agent still again raises questions about whether he had ever been an FBI agent, it is that basic.

But then if Brown had the slightest idea of what the Secret Service was investigating he might not have been as inaccurate in what he wrote, quoted above, about the Jones Printing Company. And from that it might have had cause to "smell something rotten."

As Brown reported accurately along with all he had inaccurately, the FBI reports say that neither Jones nor Silver recognized Oswald as the man who picked those handbills up. In fact they both insisted that man was not Oswald. And that at the least indicated that Oswald was not all that alone. But the Secret Service, not knowing that the FBI was supposedly investigating that, started its own. As soon as the FBI in New Orleans learned this it alerted Headquarters and Headquarters had the Secret Service end that investigation. The result is that the FBI's misrepresentation is what was on file with it and with the Commission.

When those FBI reports are read with care they do imply that Jones and Silver went farther than saying they did not identify Oswald as the man who picked that job up. The first law being cover the Bureau's ass and the second being cover your own, those agents covered their own, clearly enough. Brown, if he read these reports, did not read them carefully.

Brown gets into a memo by then Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who Brown fails to identify along with not telling the reader that the Deputy Attorney General is second in command at Justice. Brown does not give the date of the memorandum itself, from his source note. It cites, "U.S. Senate Intelligence Report, John F. Kennedy Assassination, p. 33" and his next citation, also to it, is to page 23 of that same document. The way he writes it Brown gives the impression that it was on November 22, the day of the assassination. It was not. Of the memorandum itself, Brown says it "suggested that everything possible must be done "to convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." Brown has this in quotes but it is not a quotation of that memorandum. I got, through FOIA, the Department's file copy, the FBI's file copy and even Katzenbach's handwritten original, written when there was no secretarial help at hand. Rather than it being of November 22, it was of two days later, a Sunday, with no secretarial help at work. As Brown rattles away dispensing his wisdom he says there are many "key words" in that statement he has just quoted but "the most significant one would seem to be "real" (page 262).

That word is not in the memorandum. The significance lies elsewhere, and it addresses Brown, his work, his judgment, his dependability and his honesty.

The first of the three numbered sections of that memorandum begins, "1. The public must be convinced that Oswald was the assassin;" and then goes on to give the omniscient Brown even more trouble.

Aside from misrepresenting it and misquoting it when he says he is quoting it verbatim, he, omniscient as always, says "it would seem extremely hasty prejudgment." That not laying it out enough for him, he adds that "to go to such lengths to make the 'real' assassin [that word being Brown's and not Katzenbach's] strongly suggests that there were well-found suspicions that he was not."

Nothing could be more foreign to that what Katzenbach and not he alone had in mind when he wrote it.

I got into this in some detail in Never Again!, which was out some time before Brown's book was published. It was published by his publisher, too.

Katzenbach wrote that memorandum out Sunday afternoon, as soon as he knew Oswald was dead and there would be no trial. No trial meant no evidence to be presented and to be cross-examined.

As Brown, insisting on remaining the subject-matter ignoramus he has always been, did not know (and would have known if he had looked at Never Again!), Katzenbach discussed this with Hoover and got his approval, according to the memorandum by Cortland Evans, FBI Assistant Director who was the FBI's liaison with the Justice Department. Some of that memorandum, which recommended the formation of a Commission, Hoover certainly did not approve.

If Brown were more than an uninformed poseur with a high opinion of himself and makes real whatever just pops into his mind as he seeks to make a name for himself, he could have found what he could have criticized quite legitimately rather than faking a direct quotation of what is not in that memorandum. The rest of what I began to quote verbatim above and he misquoted reads: "that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that he would have been convicted at trial," It is the last clause that lends itself to ridicule and condemnation. There not only never was any such evidence, it was not possible that it could have been gathered, if it had existed, by the time he wrote that.

Brown does not even report to whom the memorandum was addressed or for what purpose.

Katzenbach's proper channel to Lyndon Johnson was Bill Moyers. The memorandum is addressed to Moyers. But before there was someone to retype it bright and early Monday morning, November 25, the date on the memorandum, not November 22, as Brown implies, he had been in touch with Moyers about it. As the Secret Service records of Johnson's phone calls made before they could be recorded reflect, at about nine o'clock Sunday night, November 24, the day Oswald was killed, Moyers got through to Johnson. Five minutes later Johnson phoned Hoover and five minutes after that he phoned Katzenbach. When the recording equipment was in use, there were a number of references by both Johnson and Hoover to what they had agreed to with regard to the investigation that Sunday night.

I have all the documents I refer to that the publisher had no interest in including in the book.

After this unperceived self-indictment and blissfully unaware of it, such being his confidence in anything he says, Brown is critical of the Dallas police for what he says was its "inexplicably" giving "the FBI literally all the evidence it had against Oswald" (his emphasis, pages 262-3).

Aside from this being untrue, as we see above, there was not a thing wrong with it. The FBI had the laboratory facilities and the skills not possessed by local police and it serves them all this way.

As Brown enhances reality he refers to Jack Ruby, who never made the grade as an FBI informer, an "an FBI informant"as of the time he killed Oswald.

Brown is even critical of the Dallas police even for not seeing what it was never possible for it to see because it never had possession of it, like that "magic" bullet of the single bullet theory. It was taken to Washington from the Dallas hospital by the Secret Service and the Secret Service gave it to the FBI lab.

He criticizes it also for not having soon the Zapruder film that it never had the opportunity to see until much later.

Recognizing no limits, he, rather can consulting the original source, which he has in those twenty-six volumes, quotes another of the more undependable books as saying that Oswald's address book "contained the name 'Gandy'." He then says "A Helen Gandy was Hoover's private secretary; Oswald may thus have been important enough to have had direct access to Hoover's office" (page 263).

This is so palpably false and impossible, no further comment is required. But it is Brown, as well as a myriad of others, Ph.D.s included, who are assassination nuts, who make up and give non-existing meaning to it.

Referring here again to the grossly misrepresented Hoover trip to Dallas on the day before the assassination, Brown actually dates it "the evening of November 21-22," which does not and could not exist, and says of it, "there must have been an urgency to it as Hoover was back at his desk in Washington as is nothing happened . . ." (page 264).

Nothing had happened "the evening" before it happened.

Can he or any of the other nuts really believe that anyone having anything to do with the assassination would dream of being near it at any time?

Rambling along as though he has knowledge of what he writes about what is merely repeating what he heard or read in the assassination trash he treasures, Brown then goes into how Warren Olney did not become the Commission's General Counsel when he was the Chairman's choice. Of this Brown says "Warren Olney III had been an FBI agent and was critical of Hoover" (page 264). Olney was never an FBI agent. He had worked in the Department's criminal division. As usual, Brown has no source for what he makes up.

This true also of:

To undercut the formation of the Commission [formed only a week earlier!], the FBI release its report on the assassination on December 5th, the date of the first meeting of the Commission. To underscore the "thoroughness" of the document, also known as the Gemberling Report, it should be noted that it even contained testimony about dreams people had regarding the Kennedy assassination. (The last known use of dreams as items of evidence had occurred in Salem in 16920" (page 265).

For all of this except the dreck about Salem witches, he has as his source, Edward Jay Epstein's Assassination Chronicles, p. 106.

Not only is Brown's perpetual indulgence of what he regards as his wit and his humor inappropriate to the subject matter, there also is no such "testimony" in that FBI report.

The FBI not only "never released" its report, it opposed other official release of it. That was much worse because the report itself could be examined and it could hardly have escaped the most severe criticism that is impossible to avoid in reading it. It leaked what it wanted to leak, what was most prejudicial to Oswald. It simply is not possible to refute such leaks and there was no effort to in any event.

The first leaking, of which I have an FBI record, was three days earlier, to a favored recipient of leaks but far from a major one. The major onslaught against the truth in the assassination ever being known was in the morning papers of December 5th. Katzenbach did appear before the Commission in an executive session then. I have and refer to the stenographic transcript of it. Of those leaks Katzenbach told the Commission that the FBI claimed to know nothing of those leaks and to be leaving no stone unturned to find out who did it. To this he added that it was not possible for anyone other than the FBI to do the leaking. As former Assistant Director William Sullivan wrote, Hoover orchestrated it. At the same time he annotated copies of the leaks expressing bewilderment and concern. The plain and simple truth is that there was not a copy of it outside the FBI's possession so nobody else could have leaked it. I know from one recipient the name of the assistant director who leaked it to him.

There was no "human way"to underscore the 'thoroughness' of this document" because it is no more than a diatribe against Oswald with so little about the assassination, as I published in facsimile in Whitewash, that it fails to give the cause of death or account for all the known shooting - in what Brown does not mention, five volumes! (Whitewash, pages 192-5).

It was never known as "The Gemberling Report" and there is no reason to suspect that it could have been.

This report was a product of Headquarters and of Headquarters only.

Robert F. Gemberling was just another Dallas agent until he made case agent on the assassination. Even then he wrote no such reports. What he did was to assemble reports as they reached him, bind them and forward what he believed Headquarters might want to give the Commission. That was not all the information by any means. And in order to assert even tighter control over what the Commission could learn, the FBI went to the not inconsiderable expense and investment of time to make a separate index in Dallas of the information it sent to the Commission. It was more than forty feet of card files. I got a copy of it in CA 78-0322. Xeroxed two to a sheet, those cards overfill two and a half file cabinets, taking up ten file drawers.

It appears that Brown heard Gemberling's name and decided to make use of it to make his work appears as other than as what it is.

Brown then alleges, for all the world as though the Commission ever intended concluding other than it did, that it was frustrated "by Hoover's preconceived notions of Oswald's guilt." He then quotes Rankin as telling them that ". . . They [FBI] have decided that it was Oswald that committed the assassination; they have decided that no one else was involved" (page 265). His source note on this is to an interview of former Commission Assistant Counsel Joseph Ball from The Assassination Chronicles and "Warren Commission executive transcript, January 27, 1964, p. 171" (page 416).

The only source Brown had for that transcript is my Whitewash IV. As stated earlier, I got it in an FOIA lawsuit and published as a facsimile, every page of it. That page is on page 80 of the Whitewash IV.

Rankin and the Commission members put it more forcefully in their January 22 executive session that I also got via FOIA and also published as a facsimile (Post Mortem, pages 475-87). Their anguish is greatest on page 486 where they agree that the FBI "would like us to fold up and quit" and on the next page, "They have found their man. There is nothing more to do." On that page they decided to destroy the stenographic transcript but the stenotypist's tape was overlooked and that was transcribed for me.

But for those who believe the Commission ever intended concluding anything else I refer them to the first words in Post Mortem, the preface titled "Conclusions First," and to the Commission's own outline of work in the appendix beginning on page 468.

Hoover was taking no chances and the Commission concluded with its own preconception but it was annoyed at Hoover's leaking, giving the impression that was true, the solution was preconceived, not arrived at after a full and honest investigation. All had had the widest political experience on the highest levels and all had the closest relationships with the FBI, many also with its director. Not only did they all see into the FBI "mentality" they also understood very well what surviving the FBI meant in Washington.

With further repetition of the Banister canard, Brown's criticism of the FBI here is still another of the endless reasons to believe he was never an FBI agent. He is critical of the FBI caption, "Lee Harvey Oswald," on a report "eight months after he was put into the earth" (page 267). That Oswald was not alive was no reason to change the name of the case or that of any file.

Finding no limit to his opportunities to display his ignorance of what he claims as a specialty, those twenty-six volumes, he writes that "The FBI also took an interesting survey. They contacted all seventy-three known TSBD employees and asked them to respond to a series of questions." He then repeats those five questions (page 267). That was not an "FBI survey." It was the FBI doing what the Commission asked it to do and they are the Commission's and not the FBI's questions. They also interviewed only those Texas School Book Depository employees who were at work the day of the assassination.

Not content with having it so wrong to begin with, Brown then condemns the FBI for not asking additional questions that he believes it should have asked (pages 267-8). He does not criticize the Commission for that when the Commission was in charge.

As with all his mistakes, confusions, mix-ups and worse, Brown gets toward the end of the chapter without the content the title would suggest other than as he made it up. He saw significance in it that it does not have. He finds it "interesting" that the disclosed taped Johnson phone conversations include columnist Joe Alsop telling Johnson that he should have a commission because the FBI would not be believed. If Brown himself went over those disclosed transcripts, which I doubt, he should have perceived what I refer to above, the references in them to the deal not to investigate the crime itself, although those are not the words used in those conversations (page 268). It is their clear meaning.

At the very end he gets to his chapter title.

A couple of generations back [and then some!], there emerged on the baseball scene an infield combination known as Tinker to Evers to Chance." [After Evers, he has "rhymes with 'Beavers']. "They received this acclaim as they were able to turn a dozen or so double-plays in one season, a feat hitherto unknown" (page 269).

Expert as he pretends to be on everything, here Brown discloses that his was not the boyhood of the average American boy and that he had little or no interest in the national pastime as and after he grew up. Not only was and is a "dozen or so double plays in one season" a national record for the worst possible infield play, it would, with most teams, be considered not a good month if that was all they turned in a month. The season consists of more than 150 games. Only one a game, which is not good, would be more than ten times what Brown says was "a feat hitherto unknown" (page 269). He does not even say what "this acclaim" was.

I was alive when their fame was still fresh and they were much talked about. That was before even radio so we did not hear those names as spoken by broadcasters who still did not exist. But I do not recall ever hearing "Evers" pronounced as "Eavers" by anyone, not then and not since then. It was always pronounced as it would seem to be, as in "every."

But then Brown is an authority on everything until he is checked out.

As we see and will see more, he is not on the John F. Kennedy assassination and he is not on the agencies involved in that assassination.

Which is what his book is supposed to be about.

But we can acknowledge he is an expert in lies, with this title of his Book being "White Lies.'

Not only "White Lies" but definitely with lies.