The JFK Assassination: A Strange and Terrible Saga Part VI

Welcome to the sixth in my examination of the assassination of JFK. Over the course of the first two parts of this series I considered the two regions --Dallas/Forth Worth and New Orleans --where Oswald resided before the assassination, upon his return from the Soviet Union, and the synchronicities and high strangeness that surrounded these stays. During the third installment I outlined the plotters behind the assassination while part four considered possible ties figures who appear in assassination lore had to the CIA's behavior modification experiments, most notably Project Artichoke.

In the fifth I began to consider the presence of various secret societies and orders that appear around the assassination, first briefly touching upon the over-emphasized Masonic presence before breaking down the appearance of members Skull and Bones as well as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) in assassination lore.

The SMOM, more commonly referred to as the Knights of Malta, is one of the most mysterious secret societies around. Its presence near the Kennedy assassination is rarely addressed despite the fact that more than a few individuals who played a role in the assassination and subsequent cover-up (i.e. Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, Dame of Malta Clare Booth Luce, etc) were members of the SMOM. Claiming direct lineage to the Medieval Knights Hospitallers, the SMOM frequently appears in conspiracy literature as an extension of the Masons though there is little basis for these claims. If anything, the two orders seem to have been rather bitter rivals, as discussed in part five.

Before moving along to other aspects of the assassination there is one final secret society that I would like to consider: the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta (SOSJ, sometimes referred to as the "Shickshinny Knights of Malta" due to the order's long time headquarters being based out of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania). Like the SMOM, this knightly order claimed descent from the Knights Hospitallers, but via the Russian line of succession. While these claims are highly dubious the order and its long time Grand Master, Charles Pichel, fell under the patronage of the Romanov family, most notably Grand Duke Cyril and his son Grand Duke Vladimir, by the 1930s. Pichel himself was also suspected of having ties to Nazi intelligence during WWII and even boasted of it in the post-war era.

By the late 1950s the order began to attract several former high ranking military officers and even a few CIA assets into its membership roles. One of the most notable was Major General Charles Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur's long time chief of intelligence in the Far East. In the wake of WWII Willoughby became involved with the Golden Lily (the gold and other precious metals Imperial Japan had looted during the war, some of which was later hidden in underground vaults in the Philippines) as well as the yakuza. During the Korean War Willoughby and MacArthur would also be involved in the establishment of Civil Air Transport/Air America (sometimes referred to as Air Opium), giving Willoughby ample contacts in organized crime as well as access to vast sums of black market gold. More information the SOSJ and Willoughby's criminal enterprises can be found here.

Willoughby

In 1955, a few years after his "retirement" from the military, Willoughby offered his services to Allen Dulles and the CIA despite his public loathing for the Agency. A year later Willoughby would become involved in the formation of what would become known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Willoughby and MacArthur had already helped establish its Asian component, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL), during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Its European faction, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, had its roots in Nazi Germany and had been brought into the European anti-communist network Dulles, Frank Wisner and James Jesus Angleton began creating in the post-war years. This network also included the Gehlen Org, several Italian fascist organizations, and other fellow travelers. By the late 1950s the flagrant Nazi backgrounds of various members of this network made it a political liability and it was taken off the CIA payrolls. From there on support was provided by a "private aid" network that included Willoughby, then an "agent" for the Hunt oil empire.

H.L. Hunt, one of Willoughby's most notorious patrons

Much of this was noted in part three of this series as well as the possibility that Willoughby himself was directly involved in the assassination. While the possibility of Willoughby's involvement in the assassination is circumstantial, a much more compelling case can be made for his role, as well as that of the SOSJ, in the cover-up. This is especially true of what noted researcher Peter Dale Scott described as the "phase one" cover story of the assassination, namely the perception of Oswald as a communist agent. This possibility was briefly floated by powerful figures within the US intelligence community such Angleton shortly after the assassination before the "phase two" cover story, Oswald as a lone nut, became institutionalized. Many researchers believe that the phase one cover story was used to coerce government officials not party to the assassination to support the lone nut narrative so as to avoid a nuclear world war with the Soviet Union.

It was not simply powerful CIA officials such as Angleton promoting the communist conspiracy, however. This narrative was also taken up by the conspiratorial right and continues to be promoted to this very day. At this "grass roots" level, the SOSJ played a key role in spreading the communist conspiracy narrative.

"After the assassination, Frank Capell was active in disseminating conspiratorial 'phase one' stories linking Oswald to Russia and Ruby to Castro's Cuba... some of them apparently from intelligence sources such as Carlos Bringuier's colleagues in the DRE... Capell was not acting alone: 'phase one' stories linking Oswald and Ruby to Communists were circulated by Willoughby's associate, Philip J. Corso, a veteran of army intelligence who had retired by 1963 to work for the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, and Cuban exile Salvador Diaz Verson, a former chief of Cuban military intelligence.

"Corso, the army intelligence veteran, was like Willoughby a foe of the CIA from the right, having tangled with the Agency in his years under C. D. Jackson as a member of Eisenhower's Operations Control Board. In 1963-64 Corso and Willoughby were part of a secret right-wing group, the 'Shickshinny Knights of Malta' (so called after their headquarters in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, to distinguish them from the more famous Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta based in Rome). The group provided a home to dissident retired military officers disaffected with the CIA's internationalism, many of them, like Willoughby and General Bonner Fellers, veterans of the old Hunt-MacArthur-Pawley coalition in the early 1950s. By 1963 the group's leading asset in their anti-CIA propaganda was a Polish intelligence defector, Michal Goleniewski, who had claimed to audiences inside and outside the CIA that the Agency was penetrated by the KGB at a high level.

"Corso built on this anti-CIA paranoia by telling his friend and fellow Senate staffer Julian Sourwine, who made sure it was relayed to the FBI, that Oswald was tied to a communist ring inside the CIA, and was doubling as an informant for the FBI. Shickshinny Knight Herman Kimsey, who claimed to have been Goleniewski's handler inside the CIA, also spun an elaborate story about how his CIA duties had put him in touch with Kennedy's assassin – the mystery man in Mexico. Finally, the chief press contact of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, Guy Richards of the New York Journal-America, published the claim (soon taken up by Frank Capell, by the John Birch Society, and by Willoughby's American Security Council) that Oswald, like another alleged KGB assassin (Bogdan Stashynsky), had been trained at a KGB assassination school in Minsk. A toned-down version of this story was subsequently published by Julian Sourwine's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, with help supplied via Senator Thomas Dodd from within the CIA."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 214-215)

Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who sat on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee with Wickliffe Preston Draper agent Senator James Eastland

The above-mentioned American Security Council (ASC) was a powerful NPO that effectively served as the "voice" of the military-industrial complex (as well as a key cog in the nation's internal security apparatus) from the late 1950s up till the late 1980s. While superficially a "mainstream" organization, it maintained longstanding ties with the patriot movement and frequently used said movement as a spy ring as well as a propaganda organ. More information on the ASC can be found here, here, here and here.

Colonel Philip J. Corso is most well-known to conspiracy researchers due to his role in the UFO field. His book The Day After Roswell was for years the primary source concerning the alleged Roswell crash and his 1997 interview with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM concerning the UFO question is one of the broadcaster's most famous interviews. By and large he is still held up as a highly credible source in UFO field despite his ties to the SOSJ and work for military intelligence, which placed him in some rather nefarious operations.

Corso, who was the personal emissary to Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI) at the Vatican in the post-WWII era, is widely suspected of playing a role in the establishment of the Nazi "Rat Lines." He would continue to have involvement in the European fascist underground well into the 1950s

"So was Colonel. Philip J. Corso, a twenty-year Army intelligence career man until his retirement in August 1963. He had been the military Operations Coordinating Board's delegate to the CIA group planning the 1954 Guatemalan coup. In 1956 Corso had sought to reactivate fifty surviving garrisons of East European paramilitary units still hanging out in West Germany and tied to the Gehlen spy network. When his Volunteer Freedom Corps, dedicated to rolling back communism, was scuttled as too radical by the Eisenhower administration, Corso attributed the defeat to 'lies by our liberal darlings.' A staunch foe of what he considered a laissez-faire CIA, Corso testified before Congress on 'military muzzling' after General Walker was kicked out of West Germany in 1961..."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 529)

credible?

As noted above, Corso sat on the Operations Coordinating Board along with C.D. Jackson, a psychological warfare expert who became the publisher of Skull and Bonesman Henry Luce's Life magazine by 1960. As noted in part five of this series, both Luce and his wife, Dame of Malta Clare Boothe Luce, may have played some type of role in the assassination. Mrs. Luce was involved with Carlos Bringuier's DRE which, as noted above, was feeding Shickshinny Knight of Malta Frank Capell disinformation about Oswald as a communist as well.

Then there is Polish defector Michael Goleniewski and his alleged CIA handler, Herman Kimsey. These two Shickshinny Knights are quite mysterious in their own respective rights as well.

"Retired CIA official Herman Kimsey (who was listed as the group's 'Associate Chief of International Intelligence' in 1970) was another intriguing Knight. Although Kimsey has been described as a former Chief of Research and Analysis for the CIA, his actual position inside the Agency remains unclear. Whatever he was up to, foreign heads of state showed up at his Washington funeral. Kimsey championed the cause of a Knight named Michal Goleniewski. Goleniewski was a Polish intelligence officer who defected to the West in January 1961. One of the CIA's most important assets, he is credited with exposing top Soviet agents like Gordon Lonsdale (a Soviet 'deep cover' agent whose real name was Conon Trofimovich Molody); George Blake, a high-ranking member of British intelligence's MI6; and Heinz Felfe, one of Reinhard Gehlen's lieutenants inside the BND.

"Goleniewski believed that the CIA had been heavily penetrated by Soviet intelligence. He was so worried that he initially attempted to contact J. Edgar Hoover so that his defection could be handled by the FBI and not the CIA. After he was safely in the United States, Goleniewski began claiming that he was really Aleksei Nicholaevich Romanov, son of Czar Nicholas II, and rightful heir to the Imperial Throne. He also accused Henry Kissinger of working for the KGB. His supporters claimed that in 1961 he told the CIA that the Soviets had recruited Kissinger under the code name 'Bor' in 1946, when Kissinger was working for U.S. military intelligence in Oberammergau, Germany. Herman Kimsey and Cleve Backster, a lie-detector expert and the Knights' 'Chief Interrogation Officer,' took out ads to support Goleniewski. The attack on Kissinger was endorsed by another Knight, Frank Capell. Capell, a devout Catholic best known in far-right circles for his publication The Herald of Freedom, later broke with Pichel in a factional split inside the Knights."

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 605-606)

Goleniewski

Strangely, Kimsey would later describe Oswald as a programmed assassin shortly before his curious death.

"In a 1975 interview, Herman Kimsey  – a CIA/Army counterintelligence agent – told researcher Hugh McDonald that 'Oswald was programmed to kill, like a medium at a séance. Then the mechanism went on the blink and Oswald became a dangerous toy without direction.' Three weeks after this interview, Kimsey himself died due to an apparent heart attack, not an uncommon occurrence among the ranks of those with heretical knowledge pertaining to the Kennedy assassination."

(The Prankster and the Conspiracy, Adam Gorightly, pgs. 182-183)

Kimsey actually died in 1971, while the McDonald book was published in 1975. Journalist Dick Russell gave some ore compelling details concerning Kimsey's claims:

"Kimsey also told McDonald that the actual JFK assassin was a European contract killer code-name 'Saul,' hired by 'a private group, but that group had strong government connections.' When McDonald set out to find Saul – which he eventually managed to do – he went through an émigré network in Europe that he called by the code name 'Blue Fox.' McDonald's description of this group is very close to the Gehlen-White Russian-Ukrainian underground – with its connections to Charles Willoughby and the CIA. Herman Kimsey, interestingly enough, was, like Willoughby, a member of the Military Affairs Committee of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta."  

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 675-676)

In the immediate wake of the assassination Knight Frank Capell would play a significant role in spreading "phase one" stories amongst the conspiratorial right.

"Frank Capell was also a source for an anti-CIA 'phase one' assassination article in the John Birch Society publication American Opinion, by yet another Hargis associate, Revilo Oliver. Oliver was not just a Bircher, but a featured speaker and award-winner at the Congress of Freedom meeting in New Orleans attended by Joseph Milteer, where plans to assassinate politicians were allegedly discussed.

"As summarized by Warren Commission counsel Jenner, Oliver's article claimed that the JFK assassination

was part of a Communist plot engineered with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist agent trained... in a school of international criminals near Minsk, Russia, under order from Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara...

"Oliver argued that the assassination grew out of the conspiracy between Khrushchev and Kennedy to enact a 'fake "revolt"' against Castro, and replace Castro with a crypto-Communist '"agrarian reformer."' Roughly the same story was circulated at this time by John Martino and by the Minutemen.

"Questioned by the Warren Commission about the sources of his article, Oliver identified his 'research assistant,' Frank Capell, 'a private expert on Communism and Communistic information, who, I understand, has the cooperation of many former intelligence officers of the Army and former members of the FBI...' It seems clear that the Foreign Intelligence Digest network (FID), through Corso, Capell, and possibly Kimsey, enjoyed connections inside the official intelligence world. Though their claims were distorted to the point of absurdity, there may have been a germ of truth to their claims, enough to have embarrassed and possibly even blackmailed the FBI."

(Deep politics and the Murder of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 215-216)

Frank Capell

As noted in part two of this series, Joseph Milteer was a white supremacist with ties throughout the far right underground. Shortly before the assassination he told an undercover FBI informant that Kennedy was about to be murdered with a high-powered rifle. And here he is attending a Congress of Freedom meeting in 1963 shortly before the assassination... The same meeting also attended by an even more notorious white supremacist, Revilo P. Oliver. Oliver had been a code breaker for the Army Security Agency during World War II, putting him in the netherworld of military intelligence. Apparently during this time he became convinced that the nation's capital was permeated with Communists. In 1958 he attended the meeting that established the John Birch Society, but the JBS later broke with Oliver over his rampant Antisemitism.

Congress of Freedom attendees Milteer (top) and Oliver (bottom)

The above-mentioned  Foreign Intelligence Digest was a newsletter Charles Willoughby put out for his private intelligence network, known as the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC). More information on the ICDCC, the SOSJ, and the vast role they played in creating the modern day patriot movement can be found here and here.

But let us move along now from the secret societies and consider what is possibly the strangest aspect of the assassination lore: the bizarre churches and preachers that appear throughout. I already touched upon this topic briefly in the first installment when addressing the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and its intelligence ties. The ROCOR was hardly the only church with such ties to appear amongst the personalities and organizations linked to the assassination, however.

At least one of these churches had strong ties to the SOSJ: the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian. This "ministry" was founded by Colonel William Potter Gale, a former military intelligence officer who had served under Willoughby during World War II, and steeped in Christian Identity "theology." As I addressed here, the Reverend Gale's brand of Christian Identity was particular peculiar, depicting white people as a celestial Aryan race while reducing Jews to demonic beings from outer space. Throughout the 1960s he held services for his ministry in Glendale, California in a Masonic lodge.

the "Reverend" Gale

As was noted in the third installment of this series, several individuals linked to the assassination met with Gale and even attended services at his church in the months leading up to the assassination. They included mercenary, Minuteman, and arms trafficker Loran Eugene Hall (who may have played a key role in the assassination, as noted in part one); Edgar Eugene Bradley, the West Coast representative of Dr. Carl McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches (an organization which the highly controversial "Torbitt document" linked to the assassination), who possibly had ties to the anti-Castro underground; and Fred Lee Crisman, long alleged to be a friend of Clay Shaw (who was played by Tommy Lee Jones in Oliver Stone's JFK) and the first person Mr. Shaw called after being charged with the murder of JFK by Jim Garrison. Crisman also played some type of role in the Maury Island incident, the onset of the great wave of UFO sightings in 1947, and has long been alleged to have had ties with the US intelligence community.

Hall (top) and Crisman (bottom)

But this only scratching the surface. Consider, for instance, the bizarre preacher Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly sat next to during his notorious and highly controversial trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963.

"When Lee Harvey Oswald made his famous trip by bus to Mexico City in 1963, ostensibly to obtain a visa for Cuba, he said next to an Englishman by the name of John Howard Bowen, alias Albert Osborne. Bowen was an 'itinerant preacher' of the Baptist persuasion, an elderly gentleman who traveled frequently to Mexico, according to the Warren Commission exhibits (mostly FBI interrogation reports). When confronted by the FBI, Bowen claimed he borrowed the identity of Albert Osborne, an Englishman who was also an itinerant Baptist preacher, when investigated by the Mexican authorities at a time when he couldn't find his own identification. He claimed that Osborne was an Englishman but that he, Bowen, was born in the United States. Unfortunately, the other passengers on that fabled bus trip to Mexico City identified Bowen as an Englishman, and eventually the FBI concluded the Bowen and Osborne were one and the same. What is interesting is the fact that Bowen-Osborne was a devoted Nazi both before and during World War II, opposing America's entry into the war, and ran a fascist camp for boys in rural Tennessee until it closed down in 1942."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 30)

Osborne's full name was Albert Alexander Osborne. Oswald used the name Alex as an alias regularly and used the name Osborne to order his Fair Play For Cuba Committee leaflets in the spring of 1963. According to former military intelligence officer and CIA asset Richard Case Nagell, Oswald also used Albert as a false name at times.

Osborne reportedly lived on both sides of the US/Mexico border --in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and in Laredo, Texas. Laredo is where heroin shipped by Civil Air Transport/Air America was originally smuggled into the United States at, as noted before here. Two members of the SOSJ, Charles Willoughby and Admiral Charles Cooke, were involved in establishing this network. Laredo was also reportedly the site of a UFO crash on July 7, 1948, almost exactly one year to the day from the Roswell incident.

Osborne's movements after his encounter with Oswald in September of 1963 are equally curious.

"Though there is no known sighting of Oswald and Osborne together after the bus ride, only twenty-four hours separated their departures from Mexico City in early October. On October 2, Osborne crossed back into Texas at the Laredo border and journeyed on to New Orleans. On October 3, Oswald crossed back into Texas at the Laredo border, and was in Dallas by that same afternoon.

"On October 10, Osborne showed up at the Canadian consulate in New Orleans, producing a true birth certificate (and false record of service in the Canadian armed forces) to obtain a new passport in his own name. He told Canadian officials he had just arrived by bus from his residence in Montréal and was en route to Mexico City for a vacation. Instead, he set off on a lengthy trip across the southern United States 'visiting churches and collecting religious books,' he would tell the FBI.

"Then Osborne wrote to the Knoxville Journal. A short article that appeared on November 14, 1963, is headlined: 'Bowen Leaves for Overseas.' It went on: 'John Howard Bowen, organizer of Boys Club here and missionary to the Mixteca Indians in Mexico for the past 20 years, left New York yesterday for a speaking tour in England, Spain, Portugal and Italy... Bowen was invited by evangelical groups of each country.'

"The day after the article appeared, Osborne, not Bowen, wrote to American Express in Mexico requesting that all letters to 'Bowen' be forwarded to him at their offices in New York City. Then he departed on an overseas trip, but there is no record that Osborne did any speaking that autumn of 1963. When first questioned by the FBI, he sought to conceal the fact that he had been out of the country for the three week shortly before and after the assassination. He had flown first to Scotland, then traveled some three hundred miles to Grimsby, England, to stay with his sister and visit a brother at a home for the elderly. 'This was the first time his relatives in England had seen him in about 40 years,' according to the FBI.

"After staying three days in Grimsby, Osborne left shortly before the assassination, telling his sister he was going to London. On November 22, 1963, from an English town a short distance from Grimsby, a mysterious phone call was made to a newspaper in Cambridge, about 25 minutes before the president was shot. 'The caller said only that the reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then rang off.' a CIA cable released in 1976 reports.

"On November 28, Osborne postmarked a letter from Madrid, Spain, noting that he planned to return to the United States in a week. Records show that he arrived in New York on December 5, and proceeded directly to Texas. After a considerable research, the FBI found him in Mexico in January 1964, and conducted the first of four interviews. Only at the final session in March did he admit that he was not 'Bowen,' but Osborne. The FBI while having 'established he is a con-man and an inveterate liar,' found 'no data of a subversive nature. Since no connection between Osborne and Oswald has been established, no additional investigation, re Osborne will be conducted.'

"That is unfortunate, since Osborne suspicious trail through Mexico, New Orleans, Texas, and abroad bore all the earmarks of someone who might have been able to tell us quite a bit more. He is said to have died in Texas sometime in the early 1970s. Hugh McDonald, an ex-CIA contract agent who wrote two books on the assassination, claimed to have uncovered information that Osborne was a KGB courier who operated for years in Spain, Canada, Mexico, and the southwestern United States. But as an 'itinerant preacher,' there is no ruling out that he rode a similar circuit as Billy James Hargis – or, for that matter,  David Ferrie, who set up his own branch of the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America. During World War II, Osborne was discovered by the FBI to of been a near-fanatical supporter of Nazi Germany."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 485-486)

an scene from Grimsby

Strangest of all, however, are the long persistent rumors that Osborne was involved with some type of assassins school in Mexico.

"At the time of the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, there were persistent rumors that Bowen-Osborne was running a school for assassins in Mexico, somewhere in Pueblo, under the guise of a 'missionary effort.' (When Bowen was first interrogated by the FBI, he claimed that he had been ordained a minister in 1914 by the Plymouth Brethren in Trenton, New Jersey. The Plymouth Brethren is the sect which Aleister Crowley's parents belonged, and from whom he 'discovered' his true identity as the Great Beast 666.) Even the Warren Commission could not accept the testimony of Bowen-Osborne, and they were easy marks. Gradually, stories about Bowen's connections to American paramilitary organizations began to circulate, including his involvement with the Minutemen. It was Fred Crisman's purported relationship to the same paramilitary group that led to his interrogation by Jim Garrison, in 1968."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 30)

The highly controversial "Torbitt document" (which is inaccurate on several levels in this researcher's opinion) made several sensation claims concerning this assassination school.

"... there were twenty-five to thirty professional assassins kept in Mexico by the espionage section of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation; that these men were used to commit political assassinations all over North, South and Central America, the east European countries and in Russia; that these men were the absolute world's most accurate rifleman; that they sometimes took private contracts to kill in the United States; that the contact man for employment of the rifleman was a man named Bowen posing as an American Council of Christian Churches missionary in Mexico; that you could reach Bowen through the owner of the St. Anthony Hotel in Laredo, Texas...

"Albert Alexander Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen , alias J. H. Owen, a charter member and employee of the A. C. C. C., met Lee Harvey Oswald and accompanied him to Mexico City in late September 1963.

"Osborne or Bowen in 1942 organized and operated a Nazi black shirt group called the 'Campfire Council' in the country near Knoxville, Tennessee. The 'Campfire Council' was sponsored by the espionage cover group, the 'American Council of Christian Churches.' Osborne so vehemently opposed the United States war with Nazi Germany that during 1942 he tore down an American flag and stopped it into the ground. The neighbors complained of the pro-Nazi activities of Bowen and his young Fascists, even though the rural area in Tennessee where they were located was very sparsely populated..."

(NASA, Nazis & JFK, "Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal," "William Torbitt," pgs. 108-109)

Osborne

As far as I've been able to determine there is no evidence that Osborne had any involvement with the American Council of Christian Churches or that the ACCC was even involved in the assassination. I suspect a lot of the stories floating around concerning the ACCC were a diversion to draw attention away from a most peculiar sect that we shall consider in just a moment. Osborne did seem to have ran a fascist youth camp during the 1940s, however.

Its also interesting to note that reports concerning some type of curious "school" or training center located in Mexico appear throughout conspiracy literature.

"We looked at the claim of alien abductee Whitley Strieber who said that, as a child in the 1950s, he had been taken to a 'secret school' with other small children. A claim with very little documentation to support it, until we came across other 'secret schools' in operation at the same time, including one attended by theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti  and operated by the Sandia Corporation, a company that ran on Defense Department contracts. Then we come across a man who shared a bus ride into Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who ran a 'secret school' in that country and who had been a Nazi supporter during World War II, running a paramilitary camp for adolescents in Tennessee. Strieber claimed his 'secret school' had two locations: one in San Antonio, at the Olmos Basin, and another in Monterrey, Mexico. Strieber had also been taken to Randolph Air Base, which was staffed with more than a hundred former Nazi scientists and medical officers under the Paperclip program, including General Hubertus Strughold: men responsible for experimentation on live human subjects at the death camps.

"Then we came across the startling episode of the Finders, a group of cultic pretension and CIA protection, with an international reach that specialize in children, shipping, some of them to a 'secret school' in Mexico. In 1987."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 409)

author Whitley Strieber's most noted work

Famed theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti would go on to become a close associate of Andrija Puharich, whom we encountered in part one and four of this series. I addressed the highly controversial Finders organization before here (the post also features a compelling rebuttal of the allegations surrounding the Finders from a reader in the comments section) A kind of school in Mexico also appears in the highly, highly controversial claims made by the notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.

"Just a couple years at into his incarceration, he told his story in a book written for him by a sympathetic author. The book, entitled The Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story, tells of Henry's indoctrination into a nationwide satanic cult. Lucas claimed that he was trained by the cult in a mobile paramilitary training camp in the Florida Everglades. His training, he said, including instruction in abduction and arson techniques, as well as in the fine art of killing, up close and personal. Henry further claimed that leaders of the camp were so impressed with his handling of a knife that he was allowed to serve as an instructor. Following his training, Henry claimed that he served the cult in various ways, including as a contract killer and as an abductor of children, whom he delivered to a ranch in Mexico near Juarez. Once there, they were used in the production of child pornography and for ritual sacrifices. Henry has said that the cult's operations were based in Texas, including trafficking in children and drugs, among other illegal pursuits."

(Programmed to Kill, David McGowan, pgs. 73-74)

Lucas

Lucas' claims concerning the Hand of Death are usually dismissed out of hand and no doubt they are seriously embellished. But students of the JFK assassination should immediately be struck by the locations he associated with the Hand of Death --southern Florida, especially around Miami and the Everglades, Texas (where he seems to have frequently operated out of Montague County, which is near Fort Worth), and Mexico. He also traveled through Louisiana more than his fair share of times.

Lucas' description of a paramilitary training camp for the Hand of Death in the Florida Everglades is usually one aspect of his story most vigorously attacked. And yet anti-Castro Cubans and their American trainers (of whom the above-mentioned Loran Eugene Hall was one) did use the Florida Everglades as a paramilitary training ground until at least the early 1960s (Henry claims to have joined the cult around 1980), thus Lucas' claim is hardly with out precedent. What's more, both drug and arms trafficking as well as sexual slavery (involving adult women) were conducted amongst the alliance of anti-Castro Cubans, Syndicate figures, Minutemen, and US intelligence assets that operated out of Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mexico during in the time frame leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as noted before here.

Then of course there was the bizarre cult headed by drug trafficker Adolfo Constanzo in Mexico, most notably near Matamoros and Mexico City, during the late 1980s. Constanzo, who became a key figure in the Gulf Cartel around this time, was a Santeria and Palo Mayombe practitioner. He was also a Cuban-American by birth who spent a good part of his formative years in Miami. More on Constanzo can be found here, here, here and here. But I digress.

Constanzo

Let us move along to one of the truly sinister organizations linked to the assassination: the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC). Several individuals, two very well known, linked to the assassination were bishops of this peculiar sect. Here's a bit about the AOCC and its ties to the Kennedy assassination:

"... the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC) had its origins in Eastern Orthodoxy, which was in disarray after the Russian Revolution. In the 1960s, Bishop Carl Stanley was one of the church's leaders in the Midwest. He had participated in the consecration of Jack Martin and David Ferrie, two of the most notorious members of what New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison decided was a conspiracy of anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing zealots, intelligence agents (and others) to murder the President. Stanley himself, according to documents in the National Archives, was a convicted felon with a substantial rap sheet. He was under investigation by the FBI after the assassination, evidently because Stanley himself had reported on his relationship with Ferrie and Martin and his suspicion that the two men were involved in the killing of the President. Garrison picked up on these threads during his own investigation in 1967-68, and cast a wider net: eventually, he would be seeking to dispose wandering bishops as far afield as candidate, including one Earl Anglin James, who had consecrated the bishop who consecrated Stanley in the first place. From the aristocratic Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia to the somewhat sleazier American Orthodox Catholic Church, the ties to the Kennedy assassination were numerous and suggestive.

"One of Stanley's associates, and the man who would take over the AOCC as its 'patriarch' a few years later, was Bishop Walter Myron Propheta. Stanley was based in Kentucky at the time, and Propheta in the Bronx...

"Propheta was a hard-line anti-Communist who had supported Dewey during the campaign against President Truman. A Ukrainian by birth, he had been a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – another staunchly anti-Communist organization, since the Ukrainian people had suffered tremendously under the Moscow regime, which had tried to exterminate their language and culture along with a number of their political activists  – and had left the church to form his own congregation. The reasons for this are a little murky, and may have had more to do with politics than religion, since leaving the Church led by Bishop Bohdan and joining a suspect group that has been dismissed by most commentators as a kind of 'bishop mill' could not be seen as a particularly intelligent move.

"The key word here is 'intelligent,' for it seems that the AOCC – particularly under Propheta – was just that: a front for an intelligence organization. As suspected by Jim Garrison, the AOCC was hand in glove with a number of convert intelligence operations being run in the United States and abroad, the Church providing 'cover' in the form of authentic-looking religious documents, clerical outfits, and a widespread network of wondering bishops who for the most part were all rabidly right-wing. David Ferrie and Jack Martin were only the tip of the iceberg, for Propheta found himself involved in everything from the Biafran civil war to the Italian elections in the 1960s. One of his successors is now believed – by Italian military intelligence – to been involved in money laundering for Serbian terrorists during the latest crisis in Bosnia and Kosovo."

(Dead Names, "Simon," pgs. 61-63)

possibly Propheta

Whether or not David Ferrie was actually consecrated a bishop remains highly controversial but researcher Peter Levenda, who was personally involved with the AOCC in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has compellingly argued for Ferrie's membership in the Church. In fairness, it should also be noted that Peter Levenda is widely believed to be the above-cited "Simon," which will be prove to be quite significant in the next installment of this series.

Levenda is the only researcher to attempt an in-depth study of the AOCC, first in the initial volume of his groundbreaking Sinister Forces trilogy, and later in a series of lengthy articles published on his "Sinister Forces" blog entitled "The Bishop and the Boys." Unfortunately it seems as though Mr. Levenda has taken the series, of which there are three parts, down but it was cut and pasted in its entirety on a forum that can be found here. There are a few compelling points made in this series that need to be repeated. The first is the fact that Ferrie and Jack Martin were not the only "wandering bishops" working of Guy Banister in New Orleans in 1963.

"... At one time, there were as many as four “bishops” functioning from Guy Banister’s Camp Street office, and these included virtually all of his investigators, from David Ferrie and Jack Martin to Thomas Beckham and the lawyer Thomas Jude Baumler. Beckham was a bishop with the Universal Life Church, along with his friend Fred Lee Crisman (the man who was involved with the seminal UFO event of the 20th century, the Maury Island affair) and with Raymond Broshears, yet another minister of the Universal Life Church and later with one of the Orthodox sects with lines to Stanley, and who became a well-known gay activist in San Francisco later on. (Broshears would claim, probably falsely, to have lived with David Ferrie in New Orleans; however, it seems certain that he was at least an acquaintance of Ferrie.) In addition, Ferrie, Martin, Beckham, Broshears and Baumler all shared the same apostolic succession: that of Bishop Earl Anglin James in Canada (about whom more later) and of Bishop Carl Stanley of the American Orthodox Catholic Church."

("The Bishop and the Boys, Part II," Peter Levenda)

the Universal Life Church is one of the most notorious "bishop mills" out there

It should also be noted that the AOCC was not actually in existence at the time of the Kennedy assassination, but was founded shortly thereafter. However, several of the bishops behind the AOCC were already a part of the "wandering bishop" network at the time of the assassination.

"In the first place, the American Orthodox Catholic Church (at least, the version we are discussing) had not yet been created. That would happen less than a year later. Stanley at the time was bishop of something called the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, as well as of the Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church, Old Catholic Church in North America. (He was joined in both of these operations by one Cyril T. Omarra, about whom the author can discover nothing so far.) Martin claimed to have been investigating Stanley 'for several private clients' during the period 1959-1966, and had ordination and consecration certificates from Stanley’s various churches dating from as early as 1960. Yet, Martin was an eager and active participant in the American Orthodox Catholic Church until his death, hardly the position of someone who held a dim view of the organization. Was his politicking against Stanley (and Ferrie) of a piece with what Propheta was doing in New York? Or was there a deeper motive involved, an attempt to divert attention away from someone or something?

"That Martin and Stanley had a falling out in 1963 is certain; Stanley’s report to the FBI that year that Martin and Ferrie were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President is proof positive of bad blood between them. What doesn’t make much sense is the fact that Martin was a close associate of the other bishops who, together with Stanley, formed the AOCC in 1964, after Stanley dropped the dime on Martin and Ferrie. The whole affair would begin to look like an inspired disinformation operation if it weren’t for the fact that the central characters are so … odd."

(ibid)

a document canonizing Bishop Stanley in the wake of his death, making him "Saint Stanley"

Earlier, Levenda provided some more compelling details about the intelligence connections of the AOCC as well as their linkage to the JFK assassination:

"In the same year, Walter Propheta was in New York City forming the East Coast version of the AOCC. In 1967, Propheta was involved with J. Edgar Hoover who evidently installed him as the “primate” of the American Orthodox Catholic Church at a dinner in Manhattan. (This tie between Propheta and the FBI was known to the author from Propheta’s own admission to him in 1968.) Once installed, he advised the other bishops that they had to present their credentials to him to be approved as part of the new AOCC. While the other bishops refused, Stanley eagerly raced to New York City. One wonders what “credentials” this convicted felon offered to Propheta and the FBI, for a month later he was dead ... a few weeks after the controversial death of his bishop, David Ferrie.

"Ferrie had been introduced to Stanley by Jack Martin, an investigator with Guy Banister’s detective agency in New Orleans. Martin has been portrayed as a hopeless drunk in Oliver Stone’s film of the assassination, and has been given short-shrift in other studies of the New Orleans connection. Martin himself ratted out Banister, Stanley and Ferrie to the FBI after the assassination when it became clear that District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating the case. We should not take this all at face value, however, for Martin – even though he pretended to be investigating Carl Stanley – remained a bishop of the American Orthodox Catholic Church for many years after the assassination and until the day he died, even participating in the consecration of Thomas Jude Baumler – a self-admitted fascist and attorney who also worked briefly as an investigator for Guy Banister and as a New Orleans politician in his own right – as late as 1974.

"Martin first attempted to have David Ferrie consecrated by another bishop on the East Coast, but the bishop felt that there was something “unholy” about Ferrie, and he declined. Ferrie then went on to Stanley where he was more successful. This occurs in the three year period before the Kennedy assassination."

(ibid)

Ferrie

More on David Ferrie's possible "unholiness" will be discussed in the next installment. For now, consider a few more details Levenda provides concerning the deaths of Stanley and Ferrie as well as possible links to the FBI.

"Carl Stanley met with Propheta in New York City in early February, 1967 according to information provided to the author by another bishop. David Ferrie died in his New Orleans apartment on February 22, 1967. Ferrie’s associate, Eladio del Valle (an anti-Castro Cuban) was murdered in a parking lot in Miami on the same day. The following day – Feb 23, 1967 – Carl Stanley met with the FBI according to an FBI teletype dated March 9, 1967. (Was this on orders or advice by Bishop Propheta, the FBI-installed "Primate"?) According to the available documentation, he used that opportunity to further slander David Ferrie and Jack Martin. Ferrie, of course, had died just the day before. Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967. Carl Stanley then died of an apparent heart attack on March 8, 1967 in Louisville, Kentucky."

(ibid) 

J. Edgar Hoover: wandering bishop?

Just what kind of arrangement did the FBI and AOCC have? Did the FBI instruct Propheta to convince Stanley to tell the Bureau what he really knew about the assassination and the role Martin and Ferrie played in it? And was the FBI disturbed by what Stanley knew?

The FBI also seems to have performed services for the AOCC. Levenda goes on to report that Jack Martin was able to furnish FBI files for applicants into "Holy Orders."

"My informant goes on to insist that Martin could be relied upon to furnish FBI files on 'future applicants for Holy Orders', a strange capability for a hopeless drunk. It is widely rumored that Martin had a source at FBI headquarters in New Orleans who provided him these files, but he also made it known that he was an investigator for the District Attorney’s office – something of which the DA was presumably not aware! Yet he had an income of some kind, for he was known to travel extensively throughout the United States for years on one errand or another involving the bishops, a true 'wanderer'."

("The Bishop and the Boys, Part III," Peter Levenda)

What were these "Holy Orders" and why were they important enough to warrant FBI background checks? And how did Jack S. Martin, a figure often portrayed as a hopeless drunk, end up providing this service? Earlier Levenda had given some incredible background details concerning the highly mysterious figure of Martin:

"Jack Martin is a pretty common name, so perhaps we should not be surprised to see a Special Agent Jack S. Martin appearing on Project Blue Book documents dating back to 1949, years before Edward Suggs changed his name (as far as we know). This particular Jack S. Martin was in California at the same time as our Ed Suggs, but was working for the OSI, or Office of Special Investigations, a department of the US Air Force. This is shown by OSI documents from October 1949 in which S/A Jack S. Martin was investigating UFO sightings in northern California by an Edward W. Gurband, a Roy Oliver Neely, and a Reverend Curtis Daniels that had taken place on August 1, 1949 in the San Francisco area. Our Jack S. Martin, however, is not known to have changed his name that early and, besides, there is no evidence at all that he ever worked for the Air Force. However, just to be devil’s advocate for a moment, there was no US Air Force during World War II; it was known as the Army Air Corps then, so it is possible – just barely possible – that Suggs/Martin did work for the Army Air Corps as an enlisted man or even as military police, but I have been unable to find Suggs’ military record to confirm or deny this possibility. I just leave it here as an unresolved issue. It would be amusing (if not a little unnerving) to discover that both Guy Banister and Jack Martin were investigating UFOs for the government at the same time, though!

"Getting back to Suggs, however, we find that he was passing himself off as variously an FBI agent or a CIA agent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the Kennedy assassination. An alcoholic, he wound up in a mental ward at New Orleans’ Charity Hospital in January of 1957, with 'sociopathic personality disorder, antisocial type'. All during this time he was married to the long-suffering Paula Martin and even had a child, but he was unable to hold down a job for any length of time.

"This is a familiar pattern in the Kennedy assassination case. Lee Harvey Oswald had the same track record as a married man with children, unable to hold down a job, and who had been under psychiatric observation (at least, in the Soviet Union). If we are to believe the record, both men had delusions of grandeur and could be considered antisocial sociopaths. And, of course, both had military service and both wound up in New Orleans at the same time, working out of Guy Banister’s Camp Street office. Oswald, however, was not an alcoholic nor was he one of Carl Stanley’s bishops.

"As another aside, both Ferrie and Martin were involved in unorthodox medical practices and experimentation. Ferrie’s obsession with curing cancer is well-known and documented, as well as his practice of hypnosis, and Martin had an on-again, off-again fascination with various forms of medicine, homeopathy, chiropracty, hypnosis, and the like.

"In 1960, Martin was interviewed by the FBI on charges that he was impersonating an FBI agent. Martin seemed to have offered the Feds a deal in which he would reveal that one Carl J. Stanley of Kentucky was running an illegal operation by furnishing false ordination certificates and other worthless paper. The FBI interviewed Stanley himself, and came away with the opinion that both Stanley and Martin were fruitcakes.

"There it would have ended had it not been for the events in Dallas of November, 1963 and a series of bizarre phone calls that took place between Stanley and the FBI, and Martin and the FBI in the hours after the Kennedy assassination."

(ibid)

Martin

Thus, Martin may also have been chasing UFOs, but this is highly debatable. As noted in the second installment of this series, Edwards Suggs (Martin's real name) may not have been the only one using the name Jack S. Martin in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Sometime CIA asset Pierce Lafitte, one of the two individuals H.P. Alberelli Jr. would finger for Frank Olson's murder (of which more information can be found on here and here) in his groundbreaking A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA'S Cold War Experiments, also used the name Jack S. Martin in New Orleans during this time period. Alberelli also dropped an interesting reference to Martin/Suggs' stay in Charity Hospital during his most recent work.

 "... it should be noted that Jack S. Martin had in early 1957 spent time in the psychiatric ward at New Orleans' Charity Hospital, where some patients from the East Louisiana State Hospital were transferred after they had been used as subjects in LSD and other experiments."

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 82)

As noted in part four of this series, East Louisiana State Hospital was used for CIA "behavioral modification" experiments under the auspices of Projects MKULTRA and/or Artichoke. And that brings us to Martin's interest in hypnotism. As noted above, this was an interest that Martin shared with David Ferrie, a man whom compelling evidence has emerged over the years that Martin greatly despised. Still, the relationship of these two men may well have been far more complex than many researchers have imagined, as Levenda alluded to above.

Which begs the question, is it possible either man could have been involved in some aspect of the CIA's "medical" experiments? After all, both men appear to be hypnotists with ties to the US intelligence community operating out of an area (New Orleans) that was engaged in behavior modification experiments during the same time frame. In this next and hopefully final installment of this series I shall consider this possibility. Stay tuned.

The JFK Assassination: A Strange and Terrible Saga Part V

Welcome to the fifth installment in my examination of the assassination of JFK. Over the course of the first two parts of this series I considered the strange individuals and happenings in the two areas of the country --Dallas/Fort Worth (examined in part one) and New Orleans (part two) --that Oswald resided in leading up to the assassination. In the third installment I pulled things back a bit and considered the potential plotters behind the assassination. In the most recent installment I considered the curious links the JFK assassination and plotters had to the Project Artichoke.

And with that out of the way let us now consider the purpose of this installment: Here I am going to focus in on the bizarre secrets societies surrounding the JFK assassination, for they are legion. Of course, conspiracy culture is littered with references to secret societies implicated in the Kennedy assassination, the most common of which being the Freemasons. James Shelby Downard and hardline traditionalist Catholic Michael A. Hoffman II famously argued that the Kennedy assassination is a re-enactment of the ancient "Killing of the Divine King" rite that Sir James George Frazer based the legendary mythology study The Golden Bough around.

The Internet is of course littered with accounts of the Killing of the King and Masonic involvement in the assassination and as such I will not concern myself with it here. For those of you who have somehow not stumbled upon the Dowanardian interruption of the assassination a copy of the essay "King Kill 33" in which this concept was first addressed at length can be found here. The famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman recently published an excellent outline of the Masonic implications of the Kennedy assassination as well, which can be found here.

the legendary James Shelby Downard

With the Masons now accounted for let us move along to another longtime whipping boy of the conspiratorial right: Skull and Bones.

Founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft (whose son, fellow Bonesman William Howard Taft, would become the twenty-seventh president of the United States and, later, a Supreme Court Justice), Skull and Bones claimed to be the first American chapter of a mysterious of German secret society that has never been revealed. Conspiracy theorists have long alleged that there is a link between Skull and Bones and the infamous Bavarian Illuminati, but most credible accounts of the Illuminati indicate that it had been defunct decades before the founding of Skull and Bones.

It is interesting to note, however, that the order's symbol --the skull and crossbones --was used frequently by various German paramilitary organizations as earlier as the eighteenth century. The symbol, called the totenkopf, was first used by the Prussian army via a Hussar regiment during the War of the Austrian Succession. Prussian and Brunswick armies continued to use the totenkopf up until the end of the First World War in 1918.

a Prussian Hussar displaying the totenkopf on his uniform

Afterwards and throughout the interwar period the totenkopf was used by the Freikorps, paramilitary units comprised primarily of World War I veterans who combated communist forces (sometimes in full scale pitched battles) throughout Germany during the Weimar Republic days. When the Nazi regime came to power, the totenkopf was infamously adopted by the SS to be the order's insignia. Bizarrely, the totenkopf was also adopted by several White Russian regiments as well. As we have seen through out this series and earlier ones, White Russians seem to appear frequently amongst far right circles from the early to mid-twentieth century (and sometimes beyond). But so much for the totenkopf.

a Freikorps member displaying the totenkopf (above) and one of the death's head rings (bottom) all SS men were given upon being initiated into the order

As was examined in the third installment of this series, several of the major participants in the assassination plot (in both the upper and lower levels) seem to have also been involved in drug trafficking, especially heroin. Skull and Bones has of course been linked to the opium trade as a result of the order's co-founder, the above-mentioned William Huntington Russell. Russell came from a wealthy family that was reputed to have been deeply involved in the opium trade. This business was managed through Russell & Company, the largest American trading house in China for much of the second half of the nineteenth century.

"Russell & Co. was the largest American opium smuggler, and the third largest in the world, behind the British Dent firm and the largest smuggler of all, the Scottish merchants Jardine-Matheson. For many years. Russell a& Co and Jardine-Matheson  worked together and were known as the 'Combination.' They virtually controlled the trade, manipulating market forces towards maximizing profits.

"Russell & Co. was started in 1824 by Samuel Russell, of Middletown, Connecticut. In 1828 it 'absorbed' the T. H. Perkins opium concern of Boston and became America's dominant force in China. Russell & Co. was very much family affair, with uncles, cousins, brothers, fathers and sons dominating the firm and its allied banks and fronts.

"The Russell was family steeped in Yale College history. The Rev. Nodiah Russell was a Yale founder. And in 1832, General William Huntington Russell, Samuel Russell's cousin, founded one of the US' most famous secret societies: the Order of Skull and Bones, along with Alphonso Taft., Taft's son, future President William Howard Taft (S & B 1878), would play many roles in the creation of international  narcotics controls and the US Drug War."

(Fleshing Out Skull & Bones, "Black Market Bones," Kris Millegan, pg. 153)

William Huntington Russell

William Huntington Russell would later go on, along with fellow Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman, to establish the Russell Trust Association for Skull and Bones. Because of his family's extensive dealings in the opium trade (as well as the dealings of other notable New England families who also ended up in Skull and Bones) it has been presumed that opium money was used to establish the trust, an assertion certainly not without merit. What's more, over a century later certain powerful Bonesmen would continue to be implicated in drug trafficking.

Before moving alone to the Bonesmen involved in the Kennedy assassination, there's a curious synchronicity concerning Dealey Plaza that warrants mentioning. Dealey Plaza is of course the location where JFK was assassinated. According to the Masonic interpretation of the assassination put forth by James Shelby Downard and Michael A. Hoffman, the latitude line upon which the killing occurred is significant because Dallas is located at the thirty-third parallel north. Thirty-three is the number of the highest grade that can be attained in Scottish Rite Freemasonry and is generally alleged to be highly significant to Masonry. For this reason, some have alleged that many sinister acts are deliberately committed on or near the thirty-third parallel north, as noted before here.

While this is an interesting observation, there is one problem: Dallas is not located at the thirty-third parallel. Rather, it is upon the thirty-second, which may well be even more significant. As conspiracy buffs are well aware, the number 322 is highly significant to Skull and Bones (sometimes the Order is known simply as Chapter 322). The significance of this number has long puzzled conspiracy researchers.

"What is the significance of the '322' in Chapter 322? William Russell imported the society from Germany and so it has been argued the 322 stands for '32 (from 1832), the second chapter, of this German organization. Possibly a chapter 320 and a chapter 321 may exist somewhere and 323 is the designation of a room within the Skull and Bones temple at Yale.

"Another interpretation is that the Order is descended from a Greek fraternal society dating back to Demosthenes in 322 B.C. This has perhaps some credibility because Bones records are dated by adding 322 to the current year, i.e. records originating in 1950 are dated Anno - Demostheni 2272."

(America's Secret Establishment, Anthony C. Sutton, pg. 6)

The number 32 in and of itself is sometimes thought to be used as a stand in for 322, possibly because the Order was founded in 1832, as noted above. So perhaps the assassination occurring at the third-second parallel north had a more precise meaning that the long revered Masonic interpretation. But moving along.

As to the Kennedy assassination, families linked to Skull and Bones appear throughout. This is most notable in the case of Michael Paine, the Bell Helicopter employee who befriended, along with his wife Ruth, the Oswalds in the Dallas/Forth Worth area upon their return to the United States from the Soviet Union. As noted in the first installment of this series, Michael Paine was related to three prominent New England families: the Paines, the Forbes, and the Cabots. Both the Paine and Forbes families have their ranks represented in Skull and Bones.

Ruth and Michael Paine

Another figure that lurks in the backdrop of the assassination with ties to Skull and Bones is Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper. Draper is most well known today as the founder of the Pioneer Fund, a nonprofit organization that became the chief sponsor of eugenics-based research in the post-World War II era. Draper, the offspring of wealthy New England and Antebellum South dynasties, was also a major backer of the Liberty Lobby, Holocaust revisionism, and the anti-desegregation movement in the America South in the post-Brown v. Board of Education era. It is possibly that through the latter Draper may have had ties to Guy Banister, the New Orleans-based private detective long linked to the assassination. As noted in the second installment of this series, Banister was a member of the State Sovereignty Committee, an anti-desegregation organization chiefly funded by Draper. Banister may also have had links to Draper via his ties to Senator James Eastland, who distributed money for a fund established by Draper. At least two of Draper's relations, Arthur Joy Draper and William Henry Draper III, were members of Skull and Bones.

Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper

Probably the most commonly linked Bonesman to the assassination was George H.W. Bush, the eventual forty-first president of these United States. Along the way Bush also played the part of an oil tycoon, the director of the CIA and the vice-President. Many researchers believe that Bush I's ties to the US intelligence community began well before he assumed the directorship of the CIA. There have long been rumblings of Bush I's dealings in the illegal drug trade as well, especially during the 1980s.

"... It is significant to note that Bush is the only figure in public life who has been a key player in the drug wars of three administrations.

"In 1971 Bush was first brought into the anti-drug war by Richard Nixon, who appointed him to the White House Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control. This 'war' proved useful for Nixon as a cover for the White House plumbers and the other hijinks that ended in Watergate. It was also useful for the CIA, which tucked its agents under deep cover in the Drug Enforcement Agency and thus tasted the forbidden fruit of domestic operations – like assassination plots and wide-scale electronic eavesdropping. And there were the CIA-favored drug traffickers who enjoyed a certain immunity as long as they did the agency's bidding...

"Thus began the second phase of George Bush's war on drugs. Once in office President Reagan began his holy war against the Sandinistas. He put Vice President Bush in charge of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, and the cowboys enjoyed a magnificent restoration. Under Bush's dual commands the CIA's airlines began to fly again; the Miami station, once the biggest spy post in the world during the anti-Castro plots of the sixties, was retrofitted; Noriega was put back on the payroll; and in the name of helping the Contras, the ineffable exceptions to the crackdown on drug traffickers were made. The war on drugs again provided cover for the pursuit of certain foreign policy goals.

"The CIA's history of cooperating with drug-dealing nations for Cold War purposes has been described as early as 1972, in Alfred McCoy's classic study, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which detailed the agency's role in the heroin kingdoms of the Golden Triangle – Laos, Burma, and Thailand. In a more contemporary example, on May 13, 1990, the Washington Post front-paged a story detailing the Bush administration's failure to act on persistent reports of drug trafficking among U.S.-backed factions in the Afghan civil war. 'The U.S. government has for several years received, but declined to investigate, reports of heroin trafficking by some Afghan guerrillas and Pakistani military officers with whom it cooperates in the war against Soviet influence in Afghanistan,' the Post story began.

"Flashback to May 15, 1984, when the Veep George Bush was visiting Pakistan, the first ranking U.S. official to come to Islamabad since Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq took power at the barrel of a gun in 1977. General Zia's gratitude knew few bounds and the Vice President was treated like royalty. At a magnificent state banquet George Bush rose to acknowledge the applause of the beribboned Pakistani generals, and speaking as America's had narc praised the Zia government's antinarcotics efforts as a 'personal' satisfaction. The general beamed in self-congratulation. When Bush left Pakistan three days later, he announced an extraordinary outpouring from the U.S. treasury – $3.2 billion in new U.S. military aid, and another $2 billion for the Pakistani army, which was the arms pipeline to the CIA-supplied Afghan rebels...

"At this time Pakistan was providing as much as 70 percent of the high-great heroin entering the world market. The dope came courtesy of an elite Pakistani military unit, which managed the truck convoys carrying the CIA's arms to Afghanistan. (The trucking company, owned by the Pakistani army, was the largest transportation business in the country.) The trucks deliver their cargoes of weapons and returned from Afghanistan laden with poppy; fabulous profits were spread throughout the military hierarchy all the way to General Zia himself...

"Pakistan's role in transporting raw opium gum from Afghanistan and then processing it into heroin was well known in the European intelligence community; it was well known to the American Drug Enforcement Agency and to the CIA. Certainly former CIA Director Bush knew about it – as head of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System he was privy to worldwide narcotics intelligence."

(Deadly Secrets, Warren Hinckle & William Turner, pgs. xxxiii-xxxvi)

Then of course there was the whole Iran-Contra thing.

"According to the report issued by Kerry Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations... there were 'obvious and widespread' drug trafficking by Contra suppliers going on in the war zones of northern Costa Rica. The Kerry subcommittee found that these drugs-for-guns activities were being covered up by CIA operatives and other players in the resupply network.

"And there are indications plenty of Contra drug dealing in [Oliver] North's diaries. For instance, there is the entry on July 12, 1985: '$14M[illion] to finance came from drugs.' But North was able to contain reports of Contra drug money because Bush's Task Force on Combating Terrorism gave North the mandate and the equipment to pursue a wide range of domestic intelligence operations against opponents of the administration's Central America policy. Bush's staff brought CIA experts in propaganda and disinformation into his anti-terrorism loop, using them to confuse the American people about the situation in Central America – the line was put out that the Sandinistas were dealing drugs – and to bypass both Congress and the Constitution in the Contras resupply effort. North also coordinated fund-raising efforts to defeat anti-Contra congressmen up for re-election, and even sicced the FBI on disaffected Contra suppliers, such as Jack Terrel, who was attempting to tell about Contra drug trafficking."

(ibid, pgs. xli-xlii)

the revelations of drug trafficking in Iran-Contra were made by another Bonesman, John Forbes Kerry, a relation of Michael Paine who recently dredged up the old "communists-did-it" explanation of the JFK assassination

As for the Kennedy assassination, Bush I, like many individuals we've encountered throughout this series, had links to the Bay of Pigs debacle. Bush's involvement in Cuba seems to have begun when his oil company, Zapata Offshore, became involved in Caribbean oil wells.

"George Bush made his first real money through offshore oil drilling in the Caribbean in the late 1950s, and Castro's revolution could hardly have been constructed as anything but bad news for the freebooting oil fraternity – as it was for the CIA. At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Bush had rigs positioned thirty miles north of Cuba near Cay Sal, coincidently an island the CIA used as a service station for covert operations."

(ibid, pg. xxix)

Evidence seems to indicate that Bush was actively engaged in supplying the Bay of Pigs invasion force.

"Zapata Offshore served as a conduit through which CIA disbursed money for operations. Sources in CIA's Directorate of Operations, told Wall Street Journal reporter Anthony Kimery that Bush 'personally served as conduit through which the Agency disbursed money for contracted services.' As a 'part-time purchasing front for CIA,' Zapata provided supplies for the Bay of Pigs operation, leasing cargo vessels and shipping CIA cargo disguised as oil drilling equipment."

(Our Man in Haiti, Joan Mellen, pg. 91)

This would put Bush in the same crowd as the anti-Castro Cubans and their CIA and military handlers who, as noted in the third installment, likely played a key role in the assassination. Even stranger, however, is the possible relationship between Bush I and George de Mohrenschildt, the White Russian petroleum geologist who befriended the Oswalds in Dallas after they arrived from the Soviet Union. At the very least Bush had attended Andover with Edward Hooker, Bush's roommate and de Mohrenschildt's step-nephew, but there are indications that the relationship went beyond this. Indeed, de Mohrenschildt wrote Bush I on at least two occasions.

The first stemmed from his adventures in Haiti in the 1960s where de Mohrenschildt was officially working for the Caribbean nation surveying oil and geological resources but was suspected of working for the CIA towards the aim of overthrowing Papa Doc. Things didn't work out and de Mohrenschildt eventually departed Haiti, but he would attempt to recoup funds from the $285,000 the Haitian government had awarded him several years afterwards. Bush was one individual he turned to for assistance in this endeavor.

"Then, in June, de Mohrenschildt  contacted his old acquaintance, George H. W. Bush... Bush was now U.S. Representative to the United Nations for President Nixon.

"Icy in his dealings with others, Bush forwarded de Mohrenschildt's letter to David A. Ross in the Haitian Affairs section of the Office of Caribbean Affairs. Ross knew what was required. Your contract with Duvalier was a 'private matter,' Ross wrote de Mohrenschildt. 'You should address your grievance in the appropriate court of competent jurisdiction.'"

(Our Man in Haiti, Joan Mellen, pg. 266)

Papa Doc

The above-mentioned letter was written in 1971. Shortly thereafter de Mohrenschildt began to have a nervous breakdown that lead to his divorce from his third wife, Jeanne, in 1973 after a brutal period of physical abuse. From there de Mohrenschildt overdosed on drugs and slit his wrists, eventually ending with him committing himself to Dallas' Parkland Hospital (yes, the hospital Kennedy died at) in April 1976. There he received nine shock treatments and insisted to his hospital roommate that the CIA was harassing him. Upon being released from the hospital he once again turned to George H.W. Bush.

"Out of the hospital on September 5, 1976, de Mohrenschildt wrote again to George H. W. Bush, who had now assumed the office of Director of Central Intelligence under President Gerald Ford. Vigilantes were pursuing him, de Mohrenschildt said in a sloppy, handwritten letter. He was being followed. His telephone was bugged.

"As he had in Port-au-Prince at the time of the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt blamed the FBI, although the reality was that it was CIA that had more recently been pursuing him. Invoking his misfortune of having known Lee Harvey Oswald, he described himself to Bush as an 'elderly man who is being punished.'

"'Could you do something to remove this net around us?' de Mohrenschildt begged Bush. 'This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you anymore.'

"'I do know this man DeMohrenschildt,'  Bush wrote in a memo to his staff. 'He was an uncle to my Andover roommate, and knew Oswald before the assassination of President Kennedy.' Bush, as Hoover had said in 1963, had been briefed. A close friend and collaborator of CIA's WUBRINY/1, Thomas J. Devine, Bush was well aware that de Mohrenschildt had 'got involved in some controversial dealings in Haiti.'

"'My staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years,' Bush wrote to de Mohrenschildt in a supercilious rebuff. Bush closes by hoping that his letter 'has been of some comfort to you.' Having addressed de Mohrenschildt condescendingly by his given name, he signs the letter 'George Bush.'

"Bush then turned the matter over to the appropriate CIA component. CIA Counter Intelligence now contacted the FBI. CIA requested 'information on the current activities and location of a Mr. George de Mohrenschildt, who has attempted to get in touch with the Director, CIA.' Counter Intelligence, perhaps the most arrogant of the Agency components, having assumed the personality of its long-time chief, James Angleton, requested that the matter be handled 'on a priority basis.'

(ibid, pgs. 268-269)

Baron de Mohrenschildt

Then there's a mysterious document issued shortly after the death of JFK noting that J. Edgar Hoover had debriefed a "George Bush" concerning the assassination.

 "An older document, dated November 29, 1963, initiated by J. Edgar Hoover, refers to Hoover's having debriefed 'Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency' on the Kennedy assassination. It was an unusual Hoover locution, adding the name of the agency to which an individual was connected. Certainly it was uncharacteristic of Hoover to blow the cover of a CIA operative in an official document, but in this case he did. At the very least, it suggested a strong dislike of George H. W. Bush, if not outright personal hostility.

"Confronted by this inconvenient revelation of his connection to CIA, one he had already denied, Bush lied, again. He claimed that Hoover was referring to a 'George William Bush,' a CIA photographic analyst, and not himself, George Herbert Walker Bush. So Bush inadvertently revealed that he was a CIA insider, despite his denial to the contrary.  Had he not been, he would not have known, of course, the existence of his CIA namesake.

"In the ensuing furor that erupted when the Hoover document became public on September 21, 1988, George William Bush, a lowly CIA employee, swore under oath before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia that he had never been debriefed by Hoover anyone else in the FBI.

"Reporters demanding an explanation from CIA were told by CIA's press flack that he would 'neither confirm nor deny that Hoover was referring to George H. W. Bush...'

(ibid, pgs. 89-90)

Naturally a potential reason for why Bush I would have had to be debriefed by Hoover himself concerning the Kennedy assassination has never put forth. Still, nothing has emerged to concretely placing Bush in the plot despite his ties to Baron de Mohrenschildt.

A more tangible link between Skull and Bones and the assassination is the figure of Bonesman Henry Luce, founder of Time-Life magazine. Luce was a curious figure, to put it mildly. He was a staunch supporter Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, going so far as to put the Generalissimo on the cover of Time magazine no less than eleven times between the years 1927 and 1955. Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang party would go on to play a major role in the founding of the World Anti-Communist League, an organization many figures who crop up in the assassination were affiliated with, as noted in parts two and three of this series.

the Generalissimo was also reputedly one of the largest heroin traffickers in the world for much of his lifetime

Bizarrely Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, would also become one of the earliest proponents of recreational LSD use, at least for the right social classes.

"Henry Luce, president of Time-Life, was a busy man during the Cold War. As the preeminent voice of Eisenhower, Dulles, and Pax Americana, he encouraged his correspondents to collaborate with the CIA, and his publishing empire served as a longtime propaganda asset for the Agency. But Luce managed to find the time to experiment with LSD – not for medical reasons, but simply to experience the drug and glean whatever pleasures and insights it might afford. An avid fan of psychedelics, he turned on a half-dozen times in the late 1950s and early 1960s under the supervision of Dr. Sidney Cohen. On one occasion the media magnet claimed he talked to God on the golf course and found that the Old Boy was pretty much on top of things. During another trip the tone-deaf publisher is said to have heard music so enchanting that he walked into a cactus garden and began conducting a phantom orchestra.

"Dr. Cohen, attached professionally to UCLA and the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles, also turned on Henry's wife, Clare Boothe Luce, and a number of other influential Americans. 'Oh, sure, we all took acid, it was a creative group – my husband and I and Huxley and[Christopher] Isherwood,' recalled Mrs. Luce, who was, by all accounts, the grande dame of postwar American politics. (More recently, she served as a member of President Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees covert operations conducted by the CIA.) LSD was fine by Mrs. Luce as long as it remained strictly a drug for the doctors and their friends in the ruling class. But she didn't like the idea that others might also want to partake of the experience. 'We wouldn't want everyone doing too much of a good thing,' she explained."

(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pg. 71)

Henry Luce

Life magazine would later one of the publication to most vigorously denounce LSD.

"... In March 1966 Life magazine ran a cover story entitled 'LSD: The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug That Got Out of Control,' which described the psychedelic experience as chemical Russian roulette in which the player gambled with his sanity. Pictures of people on acid cowering in corners, beyond communication, were used to underscore the message that LSD 'could be a one-way trip to an asylum, prison, or grave.' Life, whose publisher, Henry Luce, had one spoken favorably of psychedelics, didn't pull any punches: 'A person ... can become permanently deranged through a single terrifying LSD experience. Hospitals report case after case where people arrive in a state of mental disorganization, unable to distinguish their bodies from their surroundings... it brings out the very worst in some people. LSD is being dropped in girls' drinks. Terrifying parties are being given with a surprise in the punch. The Humane Society is picking up disoriented dogs...'"

(ibid, pgs. 150-151)

As for the Kennedy assassination, Luce is most commonly connected to it via the purchase of the notorious Zapruder film by Time-Life almost immediately after the assassination.

"By November 25, 1963, Life magazine was said to purchased the original copy, negotiating through the Passman/Jones law firm to pay Zapruder at least $150,000 for all rights. The man who made the deal was Life's publisher, C. D. Jackson, who said he was so horrified by what he saw all that he decided the film must be permanently locked away from public view. It was revealed years later that Jackson, who died in 1964, had been Time-Life founder Henry Luce's personal emissary to the CIA – approving specific arrangements to provide CIA employees with Time-Life cover.

"In its December 6, 1963, issue, Life sought to explain away the view of some of the Dallas doctors that a small wound observed in the president's throat was an entrance wound. The Life article said: 'But the 8mm [Zapruder] film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed – towards the sniper's nest – just before he clutches it.'

"That account was patently false, since the film clearly showed that the president had never made such a term. But, at the time, nobody outside Time-Life or the government had seen the film. Only after Jim Garrison won a lawsuit to obtain a copy – which Time-Life fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – was the Zapruder movie finally shown at the Clay Shaw trial. It aired for the first time on national TV in 1975."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 583-584)

C.D. Jackson

In many accounts this is the end of Luce's involvement in the assassination and yet he and his wife seem to have had ties to individuals and organizations long linked to the assassination plot on every level. For instance, Luce was a long time friend and former lover of Mary Bancroft. Bancroft, as noted in part one, had also been Allen Dulles' mistress for some twenty years and also carried out assignments for the spymaster.

What's more, Luce seems to have been a major financial patron of Alpha 66, arguably the most militant of the anti-Castro Cuban groups. As noted part three of this series, Alpha 66 was closely linked to both the assassination as well as organized crime. Reportedly Luce's financial contributions to the organization were quite considerable.

"... Alpha 66 was violently anti-Kennedy in 1963. With the active support of Henry Luce and Time-Life, which is said to spent a quarter of a million dollars, Alpha 66 made a point of attacking Russian targets in Cuba, in an attempt to shatter the growing convergence of U.S. and Soviet policies in the Caribbean after the nuclear scare of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. When the President appealed separately to Luce and to the exiles to cease their attacks, both rebuffed him..."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 254-255)

Clare Boothe Luce was also actively involved with the anti-Castro underground. She, along with William Pawley (a key figure in establishing Civil Air Transport/Air America, the notorious CIA-backed airline long linked to drug trafficking; as well as a member of the powerful, far right think tank the American Security Council, as noted before here), was one of the key backers of the student group Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE). As noted in part two, it was DRE member Carlos Bringuier that Oswald had his notorious confrontation with in New Orleans while the former Marine was handing out Fair Play For Cuba Committee leaflets.

"...  the DRE was subsidized by Pawley and his friend Clare Boothe Luce ... and the DRE head office in Miami had received a report from DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier on his meetings with Oswald, along with one of Oswald's FPCC leaflets and a tape recording of the Oswald-Bringuier radio debate ..."

(ibid, pg. 120)

Later Clare Boothe Luce and the DRE would become deeply involved in an attempt to depict Oswald as a Cuban/Russian agent.

"The DRE led the charge towards a Castro-used-Oswald scenario. Jose Lanusa, the DRE's Miami chief, contacted Clare Boothe Luce and Daniel James about Oswald on November 22, 1963. Luce, the wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, and free-lance writer James were both board members of the Committee to Free Cuba, which had been established in May 1963. James promptly called the FBI. 'LANUSA described OSWALD  definitely a communist and a supporter of FIDEL CASTRO,' an FBI report states. '... LANUSA also advised him that FIDEL CASTRO, in early September at a function at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana, remarked that if the United States causes him difficulty he has facilities to "knock off United States leaders."'

"Luce, a former Congresswoman and U.S. ambassador to Italy, waited longer to come forward. Then, during the Garrison and House Assassination Committee investigations, she made a point of passing along a story that originated with the DRE. Luce said she had gotten a phone call the night of the assassination and been told that the DRE had 'penetrated' Oswald's organization after he came around offering his services as a potential Castro assassin. DRE members had worked their way inside the 'Communist cell,' where Oswald was tape-recorded bragging about being 'the greatest shot in the world with telescopic rifle.' Luce said she had instructed the exiles to turn everything over to the FBI. The House Assassination Committee spent many fruitless hours looking to track down Luce's leads."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 403)

Clare Booth Luce

Nor was Mrs. Luce the only individual with ties to Skull and Bones who would vigorously champion the cause of Oswald-as-a-communist agent. Bonesman James Jesus Angleton, the figure upon whom the Matt Damon character in The Good Shepherd is based, would go to great lengths attempting to establish links to Oswald and the communists as well.

As noted in the third installment of this series, Angleton was likely one of the key plotters in the assassination and the individual who "managed" the CIA throughout the plot. Indeed, evidence has emerged indicating that Angleton may even have been the one who sent Oswald to the Soviet Union as part of a false defector operation he oversaw (as addressed in the third installment). His Counterintelligence (CI) staff began keeping records on Oswald shortly after his defection, years before he returned to the United States.

Angleton was a close friend of Allen Dulles and one of the most powerful figures in the history of the CIA (he was also deeply involved in the Agency's drug trafficking, as noted before here and here). Thus, some eyebrows were raised when he began proclaiming communist plots shortly after the assassination unfolded.

"The falsified 'Lee Harvey Oswald' cables of October 1963, which became part of a CI/SIG file on 'Lee Harvey Oswald' going back to 1960, were supervised by officers of the small Angleton-FBI veterans clique in CI. One can imagine that this clique had used their falsified file on Lee Harvey Oswald as part of the CI/SIG's search for a KGB penetration agent, or 'mole,' within the CIA's ranks. This search became particularly active in 1963, the year of falsified cable traffic about Oswald.

"It is certain however that the effect of the falsified Oswald documentation, consciously or accidentally, was to incriminate him falsely as an apparent KGB assassin. One day after the assassination, the CIA Counterintelligence staff speculated on the sinister implications of Oswald's alleged contact with Kostikov; and it continued to do so for years after. For Kostikov was not just a known KGB agent; he was suspected by Counterintelligence officials in the FBI and CIA of working for the KGB's Department Thirteen, which according to a contemporary CIA memo was 'responsible for sabotage and assassination.' This falsified picture of Oswald as a potential KGB assassin, though never used by the Warren Commission against him, almost certainly contributed to the Warren Commission's determination to close the case as the work of a lone assassin. The alleged Oswald-Kostikov-Department Thirteen connection must have seemed particularly ominous after the Commission was informed by Richard Helms that

The Thirteenth Department headquarters, according to very reliable information, conducts interviews or, as appropriate, file reviews on every former military defector to the USSR to study and to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin.

"CIA and FBI officials have since said that their respective agencies made mistakes in their handling of the Oswald case prior to Kennedy's murder. Yet the Counterintelligence staffs of CIA and FBI, who were responsible for the alleged mistakes, were also given responsibility for investigating the Kennedy assassination afterwards. The CI/SIG in particular, which had misrepresented Oswald within the CIA, was given responsibility for liaison on the assassination with the CI staff in the FBI, who were given secret FBI reprimands for having failed to put Oswald on the FBI's Security Index."

(Deep Politics II, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 5-6)

Angleton

The Counterintelligence shenanigans would continue throughout the Warren Commission with a special emphasis on depicting Oswald as a communist agent, a prospect that surely terrified more than a few members of the Commission who had recently dodged World War III developing over the Cuban Missile Crisis. WWIII would have surely been inevitable if Oswald was a Cuban or Soviet agent, and Angleton ensured that this possibility was never far from the Commission's mind.

"Angleton and his Counterintelligence Staff, however, were picked in the CIA to handle the Kennedy assassination... Within the CIA, a quite parallel investigation warp, analogous to that in the FBI. There too the investigation of a possible foreign conspiracy, originally lodged with Latin American experts in the Western Hemisphere Division (WH), had after two weeks been snatched away by CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, William Sullivan's counterpart in the CIA... Angleton's pretext for doing so was a cable from Win Scott, linking Kostikov to WH's agent Rolando Cubela.

"In the CIA, as in the FBI, there are signs that some hidden agenda dictated pre-assassination handling of the Oswald file. Years later Angleton recalled that he and his office had been given the assignment of liaison with the Warren Commission because they 'knew the mechanisms of the KGB [and] of the Cuban DGI.' He spontaneously 'raised the specter of the KGB's [and Kostikov's] Department 13,' whose specialties were defined in a 1964 CIA report from his staff to the Warren Commission as 'abduction and murder.' Both Angleton and his deputy Ray Rocca are known to have argued, along with Mexico City Ambassador Thomas Mann, that Communists might have been responsible for Kennedy's murder. Given the CIA anxiety in 1993 about Departments 13's capability for murder, why then did the CIA suppress all reference to the sinister Kostikov when notifying the FBI, on October 10, 1963, of the 'Oswald' contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City?

"... One has to wonder about the CIA station's handling of the 'phase one' Kostikov story as well. Was the cable about 'Cubella' a plant, to give Angleton leverage over his colleagues, and gain control the case? In any event, the JFK assassination investigation was soon dominated by two Hoover allies: by Angleton (a 'phase one' believer) on the CIA side, and on the FBI side by his very close associate Sullivan, a 'phase two' believer, but also Win Scott's former chief from the days of the wartime FBI SIS service, and an Angleton crony above all.

"A third interested party to this coterie appears to have been Allen Dulles. Now no longer in the CIA but on the Warren Commission, he remained very close to Angleton and his counterintelligence set..."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 66-67)

Win Scott, the Mexico City Station Chief and Angleton crony 

The above references to "phase one" and "phase two" were terms the esteemed Peter Dale Scott applied to the cover-up following the assassination, phase one being the appearance of Oswald as a communist agent and phase two (and the one to receive official endorsement) as a "lone nut." Scott and many other researchers believe that the phase one explanation of Oswald was used as means of encouraging forces outside the assassination plot from looking to deeply into the murder less they trigger a nuclear World War.

By most accounts Angleton's close friend Allen Dulles dominated the Warren Commission and ensured it avoided any serious attempts at investigating the assassination by elements that weren't totally deterred by the nuclear card.

"One reason for the Commission's ignorance about the Oswald file – and the subsequent importance of Mexico City – is that Helms actually pointed Angleton to be the main liaisons to the Commission. Unlike his predecessor in that spot, John Whitten, Angleton tried to accent Oswald's Russian period for the Commission. Whitten wanted to highlight the Cuban connection. It appears Helms did not wish that dangers grand to be explored. He therefore brought in Angleton to be the CIA's chief interface for the Commission. Since Angleton and Dulles were close colleagues from the 1940s, Dulles tipped off his friend as to what queries  they would get about Oswald from the Commission. Since there had been a rumor that Oswald was an FBI agent, Dulles informed Angleton in advance as to what the Commission queries would likely be about Oswald's possible intelligence ties. Then Angleton and William Sullivan of the FBI rehearsed and unified the responses to deny any intelligence connection to the alleged assassin. This was an important part of the cover up since it curtailed any inquiry into the question of whether or not agent Oswald was completing a mission in Mexico that he began in New Orleans. That is, was he further discrediting the FPCC by associating with communist foreign consulates and trying to gain transport Cuba? What made this even more crucial is the fact that there was an 'operational interest' in Oswald held by handful of officers in the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) of the CIA just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. This group was involved with what was left of the Kennedy campaign against Cuba, which was not very much. But as far as the Warren Commission inquiry into Mexico City goes, we have established two key points: 1.) Slawson was much too trusting of the Agency, and 2.) Angleton and Dulles were determined to keep clues about any preexisting relationship to Oswald and the CIA concealed."

(Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, pgs. 347-348)

Allen Dulles

"Incidentally," Dulles also happened to belong to a notorious secret society.

"How [Warren] Broglie was first introduced to the world of intelligence work is unknown, but there is evidence that he came into contact with OSS official Allen Dulles sometime during the Second World War in Basle, Switzerland. Additionally, both men, as well as Conrad Hilton, and several other high-ranking CIA officials, were directors and the Knights of Malta, a long-standing Roman Catholic lay order founded at the time of the Crusades, that today counts among its members some of the richest and most influential men in the world, including many former and current high-ranking CIA officials."

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 384)

The above-mentioned Warren Broglie made a curious appearance in Oswald's saga as well, which shall be addressed in just a moment. For the time being, let us briefly consider the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), more commonly referred to as the Knights of Malta. While the SMOM frequently appears in conspiracy literature it is typically with precious few details and those often revolve around it being an extension of Freemasonry. But researcher John J. Robinson, whose Born in Blood is generally considered the most compelling account linking Freemasonry to the Medieval Knights Templar, took a much different view. He believed that one of the three "Juwes" mentioned in the Masonic myth of the murder of Grand Master Hiram Abiff was the Knights Hospitallers (who eventually became the SMOM) and argued that this was evidence of a long standing rivalry between the two orders.

"As we search British history to find an unfinished temple as a basis for an exclusively British secret society, we find just one answer, in the religious order that often called itself by that simple name alone: the Temple. Jacques de Molay and his predecessor signed documents over the title Magister Templi, Master of the Temple. And that temple, taking its name from the Temple of Solomon, certainly was left unfinished upon the murder of its masters, who also had been tortured to reveal their secrets by three assassins that ultimately destroyed them. Not Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, but Philip the Fair of France, Pope Clement V, and the order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. Many who have read only the Catholic Church's summary of the Templar suppression may object, stating that only the king of France could be considered the 'assassin' of the Knights Templar, having done all the dirty work and having coerced a weak pope to help him. True, that is the church as usual version to this very day, but the historical facts speak somewhat to the contrary...

"When Edward II of England declined to tortured the Templars, the pope could have thrown the problem backed Edward's father-in-law, the king of France: No one forced Clement V to dispatch ten church torture specialist to London. The pope could have lived with the acquittal of the Templars on Cyprus: No one forced him to demand a new trial, or to dispatch a torture team with the power to draw upon the local the Dominicans and Franciscans if extra help was required. Nor did the king of France prevail in his desire that one of his family be made the head of the combined Hospitaller/Templar order, with full access to the combined wealth. And if Clement V had been  merely a timorous puppet Pope with Phillip pulling the strings, as church historians would have us believe, the kings of France would have been the new owners of the Templar properties in France, not the Hospitallers. The pope was much tougher, or at least much more obstinate, then we have been led to believe, and it would appear that he had contrived a plan of his own in concert with the Hospitallers.

"That order has managed to escape any criticism in the matter of the Templar suppression, but apparently only because it had kept a low profile throughout, probably for the very good reason that its role and its reward have been worked out in advance. It is well known that the papacy was in favor of the union of the Templars and the Hospitallers and had already determined that Foulques de Villaret, master of the Hospitallers, would be the Grand Master of the combined orders. The Templars, at their headquarters on Cyprus, had heard of the serious intent to combine the orders and had taken the time to prepare a written tribunal. The Hospitallers, at their own headquarters on the same island, must have received the same information, yet they prepared no rebuttal, written or verbal. In fact, de Villaret  managed to stay away from the meeting in France altogether, with no recorded papal criticism for his absence. That was undoubtedly because his presence wasn't needed and because there was no point in chancing a confrontation between the two orders, especially since the pope was already dedicated to looking after the interests of the Hospitallers. Not only did the Hospitallers offer no objection to the concept of the merger, but they made no attempt whatever to speak up for their brother warrior-monks as they were arrested and tortured. They simply stayed out of it and bided their time, until Clement V, much to the anger of King Philip, declared that all of the confiscated Templar property would go to the Knights Hospitaller and that all released Templars could be taken into the Hospitaller order, thereby achieving de facto the union he had been planning all along, with full Hospitaller approval and cooperation. If one looks for motive, the Hospitaller order was the major beneficiary of the suppression of the Templars, as had probably been the plan from the beginning. The pope and the Hospitallers together thwarted the aims of Philip of France, and there should be no doubt that the Hospitallers rank as one of the three assassins of the Order of the Temple."

(Born in Blood, John J. Robinson, pgs. 271-273)

Foulques de Villaret

At this point let us pause in our consideration of the Knights of Malta and once again consider one of theories put forth concerning the meaning of the alias, Clay (sometimes Clem) Bertrand, used by Clay Shaw (who was portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in Oliver Stone's JFK), the man Jim Garrison tried for the murder of JFK in the late 1960s:

"The reason Shaw would pick this particular name is very likely because it derives from Pope Clement V, whose surname was Bertrand D'Agout. (It would also explain why in some instances, he used the first name Clem.) This pope had sheltered homosexuals in the fourteenth century. His legacy lived on in the cloistered homosexual community. So much so that their developed a Clement Bertrand Society which helped homosexuals with legal problems. That Shaw/Bertrand sent the gay Latins to Dean Andrew suggests that Shaw was aware of this bit of history."

(Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, pg. 211)

Pope Clement V, who was apparently sheltered homosexuals while simultaneously persecuting the Templar order for a host of "immoral" acts, including sodomy...

Was Shaw also aware that this was the pope who suppressed the Templars and gave their holdings to the Knights of Malta? More than a few websites across the Internet allege that Shaw himself was a member of the Knights of Malta, but I have been unable to reliably confirm this.

Clay Shaw

But certainly there were several key Knights of Malta surrounding the assassination and the cover up. In addition to Dulles there was also Angleton himself, as well as John McCone, Director of the CIA at the time of the assassination (though he does not seem to have been involved). The ties between the SMOM and the CIA were longstanding, if little addressed. OSS (the predecessor organization to the CIA) founder William "Wild Bill" Donovan, whose OSS clique would dominate the CIA for decades, was a member of the Order. As I noted before here, SMOM member William Casey, as Director of the CIA during the Reagan administration, involved the Order in the private aid network dedicated to arming the Contras.

There have long been allegations that George H.W. Bush himself was also a member of the SMOM. I have not been able to reliably confirm this though Wikipedia (for what it's worth) claims that Bush I was brought into the pro Merito Melitensi, a branch of the SMOM described as a "knightly order of merit." Henry Luce is also widely reported to be an SMOM member as well but I was not able to conifirm this either. Clare Boothe Luce, however, was most certainly a Dame of Malta (the female branch of the SMOM).

But as far as the Kennedy assassination is concerned, the appearance of the above-mentioned SMOM member Warren Broglie is especially curious. Naturally Broglie cropped up in one of the strangest and most contested Oswald episodes leading up to the assassination: His trip to Mexico.

"... the Hotel Luma. The manager of... hotel... was Warren Broglie, a Swiss whom Arthur Greenstein recalled as being fluent in four languages. Broglie was also in charge of hotels in Acapulco and along the Yucatán and Baja peninsulas. One of these was owned by the reclusive billionaire Daniel K. Ludwig, another by American oilman J. Paul Getty. But the modest Luma served for twenty years as Broglie's 'home base' because so much of his business was transacted in Mexico City...

"Broglie's bartender and relief headwaiter at the Luma was Franz Waehauf. Of German heritage, he had served in the German military's merchant marine during World War II, afterwards ending up in Mexico. Though he never gained Mexican citizenship, Waehauf stayed on. By 1962 he had been working at the Luma for more than a decade."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 238-239)

Waehauf has been widely linked to Czech intelligence, which at the time was aligned to the Soviet Union. Curiously Francis Parker Yockey, a key figure in the post-WWII fascist underground, would also do some work for Czech intelligence in the 1950s. Frequently the fascist underground maintained contacts with the intelligence services of both the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. Conversely, Waehauf's boss, Broglie, had ties to various US intelligence agencies.

"... Broglie, a Swiss-national, had been a confidential informer and willing asset to the CIA (as well as to the Narcotics Bureau and FBI) for about ten years. Broglie was also quite close friends with Winston Scott as he was also with Scott's third wife, Janet Graham Leddy Scott. Indeed, Broglie was a special, head-table guest, along with David Atlee Phillips, another of his close friends, at Janet Scott's lavish 1963 birthday party reportedly held in a private room at the Hotel Luma..."

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 406)

David Atlee Phillips

As noted above, Winston Scott was the CIA Station Chief during Oswald's trip and was likely involved in the "phase one" deception (possibly unwittingly) of Oswald as a communist agent on some level. He was also a close friend of James Angleton. David Atlee Phillips, as noted in the third installment of this series, is widely believed to have played a major role in the assassination. He was the handler of the militant anti-Castro Cuban group Alpha 66 and some researchers also believe for Oswald, who may traveled to Mexico to meet with him.

Robert Buick, an American bullfighter living in Mexico City at the time, frequented the Hotel Luma in 1963. In late September of that year he would claim to see Lee Harvey Oswald (using the alias Alex Hidell) there on at least two occasions and engaged in curious conversations with Broglie and Waehauf. He recounted the following to journalist Dick Russell:

"So Buick watched Alex Hidell from a distance, watched as he huddled in conversations with bartender Waehauf and sometimes hotel town manager Broglie. 'As I recall, "Alex" wasn't in a hotel very long. I saw him once fleetingly, either leaving the bar or the lobby going out the front door. I saw them twice in the bar. There was times where him, Waehauf and Broglie, all three of them, were completely out of sight. They never all left together or came back together, but then all of a sudden one would come in. Five minutes would pass, and another shows up. Ten minutes later, the third one comes back in the bar. Sometimes as much as an hour would go by when none of them were around. So what is the conjecture there? Probably meeting in one of the vacant motel rooms, who knows?...'

"Buick claimed he did overhear snatches of conversations in the Luma bar concerning an assassination attempt against President Kennedy. 'And I related this to those gentlemen I would meet in the park. It wasn't so much what I heard at one specific moment, you understand? And it wasn't something that was directly stated, but more implied. Only in retrospect that it all come together for me...'

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 378)

Robert Clayton Buick

Those gentlemen in the park Buick makes reference to were apparently agents of some branch of US intelligence who asked Buick to keep an eye out for suspicious individuals he encountered in Mexico City, or so he claims. Buick was later convicted of robbing several banks in 1966. Another individual, military intelligence officer Richard Case Nagell, who came forward with information concerning the assassination was arrest for a bank "robbery" in Texas shortly before the assassination.

While what role, if any, SMOM member Broglie had in the assassination is highly debatable his appearance in Mexico City, along with the German Waehauf, is most curious. SMOM member Allen Dulles would have contact with the Nazi regime during his stay in Switzerland for the OSS. Later on he and fellow SMOM member James Jesus Angleton would play a key role in organizing former Nazi and Quisling forces into an anti-communist network in Europe after WWII, as noted before here and here. Was SMOM member Broglie, who may have first encountered Dulles in Switzerland during WWII, a part of this network?

Besides the SMOM this anti-communist network, which would eventually crystallize under the banner of the World Anti-Communist League (which had direct links to the assassination, as noted in part two and three of this series), had ties to another bizarre and even more obscure secret society linked to the Medieval Knights Hospitallers. In the next installment of this series we shall consider this Order and its ties to the Kennedy assassination as well as the bizarre churches also linked. Stay tuned.