Come 1970, John Lennon and Yoko Ono faced a number of stresses from their increasing political activism, the acrimonious break-up of the Beatles, and a prolonged battle against drug addiction, chronicled in the song "Cold Turkey," recorded September of 1969. Seeking relief, they received temporary visas to visit the US for temporary treatment by the noted, and somewhat controversial, psychoanlayst, Dr. Arthur Janov. The Lennons arrived in LA on April 23, 1970, accompanied by George Harrison and his wife Patricia Boyd.
The FBI sat in wait of their arrival, intending to monitor the movements of all four the moment they stepped off the airplane:
While Lennon and the Harrisons have shown no propensity to become involved in violent antiwar demonstrations, each recipient remain alert [sic] for any information of such activity on their part or for information indicating they are using narcotics. Submit any pertienent information attained in form suitable for dissemination.
The trip itself proved uneventful, and the Lennons returned to London to record that fall. But problems came when the two attempted to re-enter the US from 1970-1971. Whereas the previous visa had a medical reason for travel to America, the new one did not. Moreover, Lennon's guilty plea on marijuana possession had given some officials reason enough to declare him an undesireable alien.
Had this stayed the case, then the series of events ending in Lennon's early death would have most likely never taken place. But some high-ranking official (or officials) within US government issued a special waiver in Lennon's favor, over the objections of the FBI, which blamed Lennon's re-entrance on "...unexplained intervention by the State Department with the Immigration and Naturalization Service."
Lennon arrived in New York in August 1971, and immediately received requests from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to participate in a rally to pressure the state of Michigan to release the prominent countercultural figure John Sinclair from prison, where he had just begun a ten-year sentence for giving an undercover police officer two joints. Held at Ann Arbor's Criseler Arena that December, the protest featured speeches by Rubin, Hoffman, Bobby Seale, anti-war activist Rennie Davis, and poet Allen Ginsberg interspersed with the music of Phil Ochs, Bob Segar, Stevie Wonder, and, of course, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Figure 1. Lennon's 1971 performance at the Criseler Arena
The FBI arrived in force that night, with numerous undercover agents reporting on what they heard and saw. The attention to the musical portions of the show led Lennon biographer Jon Wiener to quip that their (now declassified) reports read more like music criticism than the intelligence collection they actually were. Some of the reports, however seem over-the-top, with cartoonish (and stereotypical) characterizations of the persons involved that in hindsight seem more rooted in paranoid fantasy than reality:
Informant advised that he attended the rally held in Ann Arbor on 12/10/71 to raise funds for the release of John Sinclair from prison....The individuals whom they met seemed to know a lot of people and took informant behind the podium to meet BOBBY SEALE, as he was finishing his speech.
SEALE greeted them as 'brothers in the movement.' Informant advised that SEALE was wearing an expensive diamond ring and a watch he estimated as costing at least $1,000.00. When SEALE gave his public speech or met the public, he turned the diamond ring around so that the stones could not be seen. SEALE told the informant and others in the group with him that the RPP [The Rainbow People's Party--an organization Ono supported] is opening three food clinics and that 'if the pigs interfere with him in any way, he will open free gun clinics and distribute free guns.' SEALE elaborated on this point and said 'We have access to all the guns we want, and we'll kill any 'pig' that gives us trouble....'
While behind the podium, the informant also personally met JOHN LENNON (former member of the Beatles Band). LENNON spoke in definite anti-law enforcement tones and is a strong believer in the movement and the overthrow of the present society in American [sic] today.
Informants then, as informants now, are in the habit of saying what they think the person paying them for information wants to hear. After all, that's what gives them their true value, and makes them money. The concern for these reports, therefore, aren't really their accuracy, but rather the picture they paint for the FBI of what Lennon stood for, and the lengths he might go to to cause civil unrest, or perhaps even rebellion.
Worse, as the national elections loomed in the upcoming year (1972), the RPP and various committees and organizations the Lennons either supported or joined (e.g., The White Panthers) threatened to become more vocal and visible, planning tours (dubbed the Revolutionary Road Show) across the United States, and staging demonstrations at either the Democratic or Republican National Conventions (or both).
Perhaps the anxiety of the election year serves as the reason for the intense surveillance against John Lennon and Yoko Ono during 1972. We now know that the FBI tapped their phones and bugged their home. The tail became obvious to Lennon during this time. As he said in a 1975 interview with Capital Radio, "I'd open the door, three'd be guys on the other side of the street....I'd get in the car, and they'd be following me in a car. Not hiding. They wanted me to see I was being followed."* He told Hit Parader magazine in December 1975, "We knew we were being wire-tapped on Bank Street [NYC], there was a helluva lot of guys coming in to fix the phones."
The harrassment and surveillance might not have been the worst of it, though.
_____________________ *Friends of mine in intelligence say that they have used this tactic (alerting a target of their surveillance) as a means to pressure them into making a misstep, and thus exposing senstive information or corroborative evidence more readily.
Sometime during the first week of October 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were staying at Ringo Starr's London apartment when a friend inside the Metropolitan Police Service (Metropol) tipped them off about an impending raid on the flat. The couple immediately dumped their small marijuana stash down the toilet thinking the police would find no evidence against them.
They were wrong. On October 18, police found a small amount of cannibis hidden inside some knickknack in the bedroom. One of the arresting officers, Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, would one day serve a two-year sentence for planting evidence in another case. It's quite possible he planted it in this one too. But at the time, Lennon assumed that the cops must have found some stash of Ringo's that they didn't know anything about. Loath to get his friend in trouble, Lennon declined to implicate his friend. But John faced tremendous pressure when police focused their investigation on Ono, trumping up charges that might have put her in danger of deportment.
The court offered Lennon a deal. If John took full responsibility for the marijuana, and plead guilty to a misdemenor, the police would drop the case against Yoko. Lennon took the deal, paid the £150 fine, and police left Ono alone.
The ordeal would ultimately cost the Lennons far more than 150 quid. The stress of the arrest and threatened legal procedings might have contributed to Ono's miscarriage shortly afterwards. Worse yet, the charge threatened to keep Lennon out of the US, where he had numerous professional and personal ties.
In 1969, Lennon became overtly political, staging, with Ono, two anti-war "bed-ins" in Brussells and Montreal, and recording "Give Peace a Chance" that summer. He told reporters covering his more whimsical protests that he and Yoko intentionally wanted to come off as baffoonish. Specifically, they asked that the media consider them the "Laurel and Hardy" of the counterculture. As John explained to one interviewer, "...we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.
The FBI has declassified and released documents pertaining to the Bureau's interest in one of Lennon and Ono's collaborations, specifically their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, recorded in 1968. Neither the music nor the lyrics caused much concern, but the album art did. In a complaint forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover by US Representative (and FBI laison) Archer Nelson dated January 31, 1969, a constituent (name redacted) groused:
IT IS THE LATEST ALBUM OF JOHN LENNON OF THE BEATLES AND HIS LATEST FLAME YOKO ONO. THE COVER OF THE ALBUM WAS A PHOTOGRAPH OF LENNON AND ONO COMPLETELY NUDE; AND BELIEVE ME THEY DIDN'T HIDE A THING. IT IS NOW BEING SOLD TO OUR YOUNG PEOPLE ON THE RECORD STANDS. MR. NELSON, IT IS THE MOST DISCOLORED AND VULGAR DISPLAY OF GARBAGE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE. [caps original]
Figure 1: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins as sold in stores, covered in a brown paper bag. (for uncensored NSFW version, click here)
The act of posing nude didn't seem that political at the time they did it. But public reaction to it seems to have actually scared the FBI. A few weeks before Rep. Nelson forwarded the letter, University of Hartford's student newspaper, the UH News, Liberated Press, ran the photo on its cover page. The university reacted by shutting down the paper, prompting a First Amendment controversy that led to a (very tame, actually) student demonstration against the administration.
The real problem wasn't the photo's content. FBI went over the picture with counsel in March 1969, and concluded that it "does not meet the criteria of obscenity from a legal standpoint." The real problem here was the reaction of the University of Hartford students, and the Bureau's perception of Lennon's role in causing campus dissent. The FBI decided to assist others using the photo to discredit Lennon, even if it had to manufacture proof that it endangered the public. In an FBI memo dated March 20, 1969 to a Special Agent Bishop, A.J. Jones wrote:
By letter dated March 17th, Congressman [Charles] Bennett sent a copy of H.R. 5171, which is legislation he has introduced to prohibit the dissemination of obscene material to minors....In his letter [to the FBI], Congressman Bennett requested 'any information you can provide me to back up this bill.' By letter of March 18th, Congressman Bennett followed his previous letter with a request for 'evidence.' which would show that the rise in crime or the rise in sex crimes is attributable to pornography.... [punctuation original]
At the bottom of the memo, Jones adds, "We have had cordial relations with Congressman Bennett over the past several years." Another curious thing: Jones cc'ed a copy of the memo to Cartha Deloach, a senior FBI agent involved with the surveillance on Martin Luther King up until a little over a year earlier.
At first blush, this doesn't seem to address the Two Virgins album at all. Yet, because of its placement in Lennon's FBI file, we have to conclude that the agency's eagerness to help Rep. Bennett, and perhaps even Bennett's motivation for drafting the bill, stemmed from their mutual animosity toward the former Beatle. More important, in both the University Hartford case and H.R. 5171, the real concern lies in the artifact's potential effect, whether that be campus unrest, or "sex crimes" (although the Bureau, most likely, did not actually see the latter as a probable consequence of the album).
If the FBI took Two Virgins seriously as an example of Lennon's deliberate attempt at subversion, then they had good reason for doing so. Lennon had become politically conscious in the aftermath of the more-popular-than-Christ scandal. Mentored by Ono, who was not only seven years his senior, but also well educated and cultured, John underwent enormous personal growth during the latter part of the 1960s. Previous impulsive, and sometimes unconscious gestures evolved into calculation, which, over time, Lennon articulated more clearly. In a January 1971 interview with Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali of the underground socialist zine Red Mole, for example, he stated:
It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere....I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to insult authority....
Breaking frameworks? School disobedience? Insult to authority? The Two Virgins album cover managed to do all three things, at least at University of Harford. So one might understand if the FBI feared (1) Lennon had the charisma and vision to foment serious dissent, and (2) that the former Beatle had declared war against everything the Bureau stood for.
You say you got a real solution? Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan. --John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Revolution”
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation began its Beatles file in 1964, the year of their first US tour. These early items deal mostly with security issues: the fear of rioting teenybopper fans, almost inexplicable concerns about rumored racial violence, and so forth.
The second Beatles tour of the US had more intense security issues arising from an abreaction to a remark John Lennon made in March 1966. Interviewed by the Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard (London), Lennon stated:
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about it; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first--rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
In July 1966, Datebook published an excerpt of the Standard interview in the United States. Most Americans interpreted the remark in the same way as the British did: as a rebuke not of Jesus Christ, but as a criticism of blind fundamentalist religion. Nevertheless, a segment of US society, particularly within the Bible Belt, vehemently objected to the Beatles because they interpreted Lennon's remarks to mean that the Fab Four had replaced Christianity as a faith, or that Lennon was somehow declaring himself to be God (see a YouTube clip about that here." It's doubtful if all of these people were Beatles fans to begin with. Yet the comment afforded many of the anti-rock crowd the opportunity to demonstrate, mostly by torching the band's records in front of television and newsreel cameras, and organizing media-savvy boycotts.
Many cite the abreaction to Lennon's remark as a turning point in their thinking about music and its relationship to politics. The band still played to packed houses of adoring fans during this last tour, but they had to put up with press conferences geared for damage control, a ban on their records by over thirty stations in the US, and hate mail delivered daily to either them or their spouses. The fear that something could happen any moment came to a head when, at one concert, a loud bang erupted onstage, somewhere close to the stacks (front amplifiers). Both Lennon and McCartney initially feared that someone had shot George Harrison. But after looking over, and seeing their friend still upright and playing his guitar, they simply continued the number and finished the concert.
As Beatles publicist Tony Barrow noted, "The arrival in Chicago was auspicious from John's personal point of view because, that night in the hotel [at the initial press conference], for the first time perhaps, he personally faced the press." This would become rather important, for Lennon would go on to face the press quite frequently from that point on.
Trying to cope with the political firestorm, their manager, Brian Epstein, spent a good deal of time, during the tour, trying to douse the flames Lennon had so unwittingly ignited. During the last week in New York, when going up in front of the cameras for yet another press conference, Epstein reminded his charges to "Cool it, lads. We've got enough problems already."
The managerial admonishion to avoid controversy at all cost fell quickly to the wayside when asked directly asked what they thought of the war in Vietnam, all four immediately condemned it. Lennon finally summed up their feelings saying, "We think of it every day. We don't like it. We don't agree with it. We think it's wrong."
It's reasonable to assume Harrison, Starr, McCartney and Lennon's unanimous public antipathy of the Vietnam War would have put all four of them on the FBI's radar. If that didn't another incident certainly would have.
By 1968, a number of activists had already made overtures to the Beatles to support radical change in the US and around the world. Lennon sympathized with the need for change, but felt that the left's general strategy was haphazard, incoherent, and often coutnerproductive. For years he pressed such individuals as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to form some kind of methodology that would ultimately lead to some good. Lennon's frustration, which he expressed in the song "Revolution" (released August 1968) led him eventually to distance himself from Hoffman and Rubin.
As Lennon and McCartney said in "Revolution," they wanted to see "the plan," whatever that might be. But no such plan ever materialized. So they took it upon themselves to draft one. Sailing around in a junk for a few days, they came up with an idea, which they announced on the May 15, 1968 episode of The Tonight Show. Guest host Joe Garagiola inquired about the plan, which John and Paul enthusiastically described as "a new form of communism."
Naive? Yes. A practical soultion? Most likely not. Ill-advised? You could make the argument. But for those of you who don't remember the Cold War, many would construe support of anything that sounded like communism (for example, "a new form of communism") as treasonous, a threat to national security. Despite their attempts to distance their vision from the totalitarianism of the Soviet Bloc, which to them represented an impure, or dysfunctional form of communism, they nevertheless gushed about their plan, prompting the conservative Garagiola to defuse the sitution by interrupting them for permission to ask the question, "Which one of you is Ringo?"
Lennon and McCartney sat in stunned silence before a commercial break took over.
It's unlikely that such a declaration escaped the ears of Intel. It's also unlikely that the Beatles could have escaped the Security Index when many of their rock and roll colleagues could not.
What's definite is that from that point on, Lennon's life took a turn toward the weird.
Q: What’s the title of the smallest book in the library? A: American Culture --old German joke, told to me by an old German
Motives for murder need not be rational. They don’t have to make sense to most of us. Courts and juries have accepted irrational motives before (most famously the Helter Skelter scenario spun by Vincent Bugliosi in the Tate-LaBianca trials). They only have to make sense to the accused.
If we ponder the possibility that the CIA orchestrated the death of John Lennon, we have to also wonder why they would do such a thing. After all, he’s only a musician.
In Lennon’s case, we don’t have to speculate about the immense intelligence interest in the former Beatle by both the US and UK governments. It is now a matter of public record. Moreover, Lennon and Ono were both aware of government surveillance at the time, for the agents involved either got careless, or deliberately acted in front of the couple in order to harass them.
Jon Wiener collected sufficient documentary evidence, from Freedom of Information Act requests, to prove that the US government not only spied on Lennon, but that the US and UK both felt that the guitarist posed some unspecified threat to national security. Weiner began his story of government espionage in 1971, the beginnings of his documentation. But we have every reason to suspect that surveillance on both Lennon and his partner, Paul McCartney, began years earlier. And we would have to look back even further to understand the context in which CIA and FBI interest in popular music began.
In her book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders wrote about the importance of the fine arts to the CIA, beginning almost with the inception of the Agency in 1947. She explained that after World War II, the United States and Soviet Union emerged as the dominant superpowers, each with a diametrically opposed political and economic system—what we now know as the Cold War. Although the Iron Curtain had descended over Europe, locking most of the eastern nations of the continent into the Soviet sphere of influence, with the NATO bloc in the West, there were a number of countries around the world up for grabs. The Soviet and Western blocs would therefore have to compete for the influence of such “developing” nations as Cuba and The Congo.
Winning the affection of so-called third world countries would depend on what the superpowers could offer. There are the obvious things—e.g., agricultural and industrial support, defense advisors, infrastructure aid and so forth. But, as Stonor noted, the US felt it lacked a certain cachet. Because of years of isolationist policies, supported by a majority of Americans for years before the war, the CIA and State Department worried that the rest of the world saw the US as culturally backwards, and intellectually unsophisticated. In other words, promoting the “American Way” would be a hard sell to someone who perceived the nation as its worst stereotype.
The CIA responded by launching a white (i.e., legal) operation called the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), which disbursed Company funds through such fronts as the Fairfax Foundation, and through such cooperating parties as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The CIA intended to use the CCF as a huge propaganda organ, promoting the best of American intellectualism and arts. For the latter, this generally meant “high” or “serious,” art. CCF monies flowed through such musical organizations as Tanglewood, at one time headed by famed conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein. Since one of the most internationally damaging stereotypes of the US involved its violent race relationships (characterized by Jim Crow and lynching), the CIA especially prized such artists as Leotyne Price and Louis Armstrong, and sponsored tours for each of them.
Of course, in retrospect this seems kind of humorous, especially when you take into account that by 1955 another American artistic export would exert a much more wider and profound cultural influence: namely rock and roll. In the minds of some, especially conservative, Americans, rock characterized more troubling aspects of American society—the rebellion against authority, parochially mediocre quality, non-sophistication, physicality over reason, and worst of all race-mixing and racial strife (as exemplified in the Boston Rock Riot of 1958). Put simply, it portrayed the US in a light that undermined the efforts of the CCF.
I have found, over the years, nothing to demonstrate a CIA interest in rock per se. Yet, copious documentation illustrates the tremendous political, social and economic pressures against the music. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated rock for alleged Soviet sponsorship in the late-1950s. Later, we would find that the FBI included the names of hundreds of musicians on its illegal Security Index, a list of people meriting surveillance, and, in the case of a national emergency, detention.
Because of 1960s’ concerns over what they called “The New Left,” the CIA, FBI, the White House and other government institutions initiated policies to neutralize the effect of increasing political dissent among the mainstream, particularly in response to the war effort in Vietnam. The FBI launched the blandly named Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which infiltrated (with the help of Army Intelligence and local police forces) a number of leftist groups. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS and Operation MERRIMAC instituted a number of domestic covert ops in violation of its known charter. The Nixon administration’s adoption of The Huston Plan, a policy stating the intent of suspending restrictions on illegal espionage activities within the United States “on a selected basis.”
Later the Church and Rockefeller commissions would officially find that the US spy networks (1) routinely and knowingly broke the law with respect to domestic operations; and (2) that their primary focus was on the New Left, even though some far right organizations (e.g., the KKK) were targeted as well. The CIA’s documented interest in the fine arts underscores the immense potential that the Company saw in art, drama and music of changing public perception—either away from their aims, or against them. They were keenly aware of the propaganda value of artistic and cultural expression. Just as they were happy to use art and music as a means to advance an international agenda, they were probably just as dismayed by cultural values that ran counter to what they promoted.
Rock, especially after the success of the Monterrey Pops Festival of 1967, took an increasingly political tone, echoing and supporting the tenets of the anti-war movement, and the New Left. The CIA had become deeply entrenched in Vietnam, in large part because of Operation PHOENIX. And after Monterrey, rock was becoming more and more mainstream, as the major labels finally committed themselves to youth-oriented music.
By 1968, no one had become more prominent on the rock stage than the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were also becoming more politically active and aware. Like many young idealists of the era, they believe that the time for social and economic revolution might be close at hand.
I Survived the JFK Assassination, and All I Got Was this Lousy Tee Shirt
Believe it or not, some managed to get away.
Jean Hill (1931-2000)--As the parade spectator closest to the Kennedy assassination, Hill obviously saw more than she wanted to. Seconds after the assassination, she instinctively charged the Grassy Knoll, from which she had heard shots. She didn’t make it very far. A police officer took her into custody. She tried to explain that she heard between four to six shots. But anonymous officials insisted she only heard three, and ordered her not to speak to anyone about what she saw.
Hill’s longevity might have resulted from her conflicting statements, which diminished her credibility. While the bulk of her story hasn’t changed since 1963, various details about that day and about her role in it have varied. Some inconsistencies (e.g., she first said she never saw the shooter, but later claimed that she saw the smoke from his gun) we might see as exaggerations, or confusion of the events at the time (exacerbated by hostile questioning immediately after). There are some instances where she clearly colored the story (e.g., she said the President’s fender almost hit her when it was in fact a few feet away, as established by the Zapruder film). But a lot of her inconsistency comes from her Warren Commission testimony, which, she insisted, someone falsified. Others would also claim that someone had fabricated their testimony in presenting it to the Warren Commission. When she later read what she supposedly said, Hill remarked, “I knew there was something crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”
Mary Boshard Moorman (1932- )--Moorman (standing right) accompanied Jean Hill to the motorcade, and stood next to her as shots rang out. She managed to capture the assassination in a Polaroid snapshot taken literally less than a second after the fatal head wound that killed President Kennedy.
Figure 1. Mary Moorman Photo
For those of you too young to remember Polaroid cameras, especially those of 1960s vintage, the pictures they produced were (sigh) kinda crappy. People still bought them, however, for they were the first cameras to instantly develop film. Thus, the quality of Moorman's photo isn’t the greatest. But through computer-enhanced analysis, some have discerned a figure, dressed in a policeman’s uniform (hence the nickname ‘Badgeman‘ by researchers), standing behind the fence at the Grassy Knoll. He seems to have just fired a gun, for his arms are in shooting position and we see what appears to be a muzzle flash.
Figure 2. Mary Moorman Photo (enlarged, cropped and colorized)
Because of the poor quality of the Moorman photograph, and the difficulty inherent in enlarging it, Warren Commission proponents dismiss the image as an optical illusion. Yet, other aspects of the photo seem to pan out.
Figure 3. Excerpt from The Men Who Killed Kennedy
Julia Ann Mercer (1940- ? )--While driving a rental car near the grassy knoll, Mercer spotted a man unloading guns from a stalled pickup truck. Questioned by Dallas Police and the FBI, she picked Jack Ruby out of a photo lineup.
Warren Commission buffs attempt to dismiss this bit of damaging testimony by accusing Mercer of lying. Mercer has insisted that someone has altered her sworn testimony and forged her signature onto documents. So naturally, if earlier or later statements contradict she, like Hill, would not have been responsible for most of the inconsistencies. Otherwise, a number of details corroborate her story, among them the fact that she said from the beginning that she had gotten a good enough look at the man (Ruby) to identify him. Also, the FBI independently confirmed a that pickup truck (US Air Force truck, no less) had stalled when and where Mercer said she spotted it. This means that she would have been in position to see anyone unloading something off of it.
Some have suggested that Mercer actually knew Ruby. If that’s true, one would have to have severe doubts about her credibility. She wouldn’t have had to identify him in a lineup, after all. She would have simply said she saw Jack Ruby. Of course, this story is extremely shaky, relying upon gossip. As it stands, Mercer’s testimony caps off a mountain of evidence that Ruby had been involved in the assassination before it had occurred.
Beverly Oliver (aka The Babushka Lady; 1946- )--As a singer employed by Jack Ruby, she had seen Lee Oswald at the Carousel Club. She declined to go on record with Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison, but has since talked about her knowledge of Ruby and Oswald’s relationship (see Figure 3).
Juanita Slusher (aka Candy Barr; 1935-2005)--Slusher had just about the worst childhood ever. After she turned nine, her mother died. A neighbor repeatedly raped her until she ran away at age thirteen. Promptly captured by a sex slavery ring, she worked as a prostitute until the age of fourteen, when she married a professional safecracker. The union lasted one year. At the age of fifteen, back into prostitution, she was forced, at gunpoint, to star in the film Smart Aleck, one of the most notorious hardcore loops of its day.
In 1952, she became a dancer for Jack Ruby’s major strip club rival Abe Weinstein, who owned the Colony Club, located next door to the Carousel. Weinstein gave her the stage name Candy Barr due to her fondness for chocolate.
Candy met and befriended Carousel dancer Jada, who often took her to Jack Ruby’s after-hours joint, The Vegas. It’s there were Candy and Jack became friends.
Beginning in 1956, Candy fell into legal problems. Police arrested her for shooting her second husband. They also found nearly an ounce of marijuana in her apartment. She left Texas, and drifted toward LA, where she found a benefactor in mobster Mickey Cohen. After she accepted his wedding proposal, Cohen sent her to Mexico, along with a $500 a month stipend. Stifled by life below the border she returned to Texas to face the pot charge in 1959, and received a fifteen-year sentence.
Candy served less than four years, before officials released her in April 1963. As a term of her parole, she could not go to Dallas, and thus had to live with her parents in Edna, TX. It was during this time that her friendship with Ruby intensified, with him calling her frequently on the telephone, and sometimes making the trip out to Edna to visit her. Shortly before the assassination, she casually mentioned that she wanted to breed dogs, so Jack drove down to Edna to gift her with a purebred dachshund.
After Oswald’s assassination, investigators suspected that Ruby must have told Candy something about either Lee’s death or Kennedy’s. The following week, the FBI schlepped to Edna to question her. Unlike her friend Jada, Candy simply told investigators that she didn’t know anything.
Candy subsequently lived her life in relative peace (compared to those around her). Gov. John Connolly, one of the victims of the assassination, even pardoned her for the marijuana charges in 1966.
Aquila Clemmons (sometimes spelled ‘Acquila Clemmons’ c. 1918?- ? )--The closest witness to the J.D. Tippit shooting, she identified two men (neither of them Oswald) as the cop’s killers. Never questioned by police or interviewed by the Warren Commission, she was nevertheless visited a couple of days later by an unnamed man who threatened her silence. Oswald’s attorney, Mark Lane, tracked her down and filmed his interview with her.
Figure 4. Aquila Clemmons
Perry Russo (1941-1995)--As an acquaintance of both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, Russo (left) could tie the two together. Meanwhile Ferrie could (and did) link himself to Lee Oswald. More important, Russo informed Jim Garrison that he overheard Shaw and Ferrie discussing a plan to kill JFK.
Warren Reynolds (1935- ?)--Reynolds witnessed the J.D. Tippit slaying, but could not honestly identify Oswald as the triggerman. A few months later, someone shot him in the head. He recovered, fortunately. Unfortunately, he had other pressures, such as an aborted attempt to kidnap his ten-year-old daughter. Not surprisingly, he identified Oswald as Tippit’s murderer for the Warren Commission.
Antonio Veciana (c. 1925?- )Veciana joined Alpha 66, a Cuban underground working within the United States funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency, in Havana sometime during 1960. Veciana’s CIA case officer went by the name Maurice Bishop, a pseudonym of either David Atlee Phillips or Jack Esterline.
Veciana told House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Gaeton Fonzi that Bishop had a connection to Lee Oswald, and agreed to tell this story to Congress. Before he could do that, a passing motorist pumped four bullets into his car. Wounded in the attempt, Veciana survived, but changed his story for the HSCA, claiming that Castro alone was behind the JFK assassination.
Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova Oswald Porter (1941- )--Oswald’s widow initially refused to believe that Lee had anything to do with the deaths of John Kennedy and J.D. Tippit. After months of questioning by the FBI, and possibly under the fear of deportation, Marina reversed her earlier opinion, stating that she now believed in her late-husband’s guilt. But over the years, she has come back to her original opinion, stating that she has now had time to re-evaluate evidence. Moreover, she now has the maturity to discern the investigators’ lies for what they were, namely an attempt to coerce her agreement. For decades she was sometimes silent, sometimes cryptic in relating her thoughts on the case, thus giving a number of authors the opportunity to put words into her mouth. Recently, however, she has taken a very public and unequivocal stand on the matter. She, and her daughter June Oswald, would like to see the case re-opened
Figure 5. Marina states her opinion on the JFK assassination.
Addendum: Judyth Vary Baker, a JFK assassination survivor previously featured in a couple of posts on The X-Spot, has joined us in the blogosphere. Click here to visit her page, which has several fascinating posts on the assassination.
What could he say? Sam Giancana apparently had ties to JFK through the President’s friend, Frank Sinatra, and through a mistress they presumably shared, Judith Campbell Exner. Giancana also had purported underworld ties to patriarch Joseph Kennedy. When John and Robert vigorously attacked organized crime in the Jimmy Hoffa prosecution and the Joseph Valachi hearings, Giancana reportedly felt that the Kennedy brothers had double-crossed him.
As two of a number of mobsters connected to the Central Intelligence Agency and FBI (through Howard Hughes’s right-hand man, Robert Maheu), Giancana and mobster Johnny Roselli served as middlemen in contracting a hit on Fidel Castro. Some speculate that he might have played a similar role in the hit on JFK. Had Giancana lived just one more year, he could have told the House Select Committee on Assassinations about the Maheu link between CIA, FBI and the Mafia, and could have implicated all three groups in the murder of President Kennedy.
How did he die? Shot in the back of the head while cooking up some Italian sausages at his home in suburban Chicago. Then-DCI William Colby denied having anything to do with Giancana’s murder, as did Sam's fellow mobsters. Various reasons have surfaced with respect to motive. One suggests that the CIA, anticipating the creation of a Senate or House Investigation into assassinations, might have simply dispatched him because he knew too much.
John Roselli (aka Handsome Johnny; 1905-1976)
Who the hell is he? Mafia Don based in Chicago, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. A friend and benefactor of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
What could he say? Roselli already said quite a bit in 1975, when testifying in front of the Church Committee. He had already gone on record about the Maheu-CIA-Mafia nexus. But in 1976, he seemed prepared to go deeper when (willingly) testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The HSCA recalled him to the witness stand later that year, but he never showed up. He might have possibly linked the CIA to JFK’s assassination through Maheu.
How did he die? An unknown assailant (or assailants) shot him, asphyxiated him, chopped his body into bits, stuffed his remains inside an oil drum, and dumped it into the Dumfounding Bay, just off the coast of Miami, Florida.
Edward Benavides (c.1940-1964)
Who the hell is he? A nice guy.
What could he say? Not a damn thing.
Unfortunately for him, his brother Domingo (left) witnessed J.D. Tippet’s assassination. Eddie and Domingo were not twins, but resembled each other so closely that strangers couldn’t really tell them apart. Domingo initially told investigators that the man who shot Officer Tippet was not Lee Oswald. After Eddie’s death, he changed his story.
How did he die? While enjoying a brew at a local tavern, Edward got shot in the back of his head. Domingo believes that the shooter mistook his brother for him.
Nancy Jane Mooney (aka Betty MacDonald; 1939-1964)
Who the hell is she? Exotic dancer, an employee of Jack Ruby and girlfriend of Darrell Garner.
What could she say? Warren Reynolds, an eyewitness to the J.D. Tippet assassination, refused to identify Lee Oswald as the shooter. Like Edward Benevides, someone shot him in the back of the head. Unlike Benevides, Reynolds survived. Police arrested their prime suspect, Darrell Garner, but let him go when Mooney arrived to provide him with an alibi. She claimed she, Garner and a couple of other friends (Audie Anderson and Helen Woalschalger) drove around all night looking for a rumored murder scene.
Had she lived, Mooney might have rescinded her previous alibi testimony. As a former employee of the Carousel Club, she could also affirm--as did others--that both Tippet and Oswald patronized the establishment.
How did she die? Police arrested Mooney and another woman, Patsy Slope, when, inside a parked car, the two engaged in fisticuffs over the love of some guy. A few hours later, they found Mooney's corpse hanging inside her holding cell. She had apparently used her slacks as a rope.
The FBI’s official investigation into her death based it’s finding of suicide on an affidavit provided by William Goode, a guy claiming to be a friend of Mooney’s. He said she had attempted suicide on a couple of occasions before the fatal night.
Clyde Johnson (1932-1969)
Who the hell is he? Lay minister, and acquaintance of David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Lee Oswald and Perry Russo.
What could he say? As a self-proclaimed insider, he could have tied together the major players; most importantly he could have tied Clay Shaw to Lee Oswald. Garrison used his testimony before the Grand Jury hearing.
How did he die? Shotgunned in the back by Ralph McMillan, his wife's cousin.
Many researchers erroneously claim that Johnson was murdered the day or week before his scheduled testimony in the Clay Shaw trial--hence the motive for his death. However, Johnson died in late June of 1969, about a month after the conclusion of the Shaw trial.
Janet Mole Adams Washington Conforto (aka Jada; 1936-1980)
Who the hell is she? Exotic dancer and drug smuggler employed at the Carousel Club.
What could she say? Plenty. Hours before the Kennedy assassination, Jack Ruby closed down the Carousel Club for the weekend--unusual, since weekends constitute a bulk of a nightclub’s business. Upon learning of the Carousel’s closing, Conforto tried like hell to get out of Dallas. In her desperation, she accidentally clipped a pedestrian, Charles Burns, at about 10:45am on November 22, 1963. She telephoned a friend who took them both to a doctor’s office, where they received medical attention for minor injuries.
Figure 1. Police accident report.
Conforto didn’t make it to New Orleans. About 100 miles en route, she heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination, returned to Dallas, and flew out to New York sometime over the weekend. Shortly after Ruby’s murder of Oswald, she went on television to debunk the reason Jack gave for the shooting. Ruby said he wanted to spare the family, in particular Jackie, the grief of a public trial. But according to Conforto, Ruby despised the Kennedys.
Figure 2. Conforto interview on ABC
Because of her knowledge of Jack Ruby, Conforto might have had a lot to say about his role in the JFK assassination. She spoke to the FBI in April 1964, but no one saw fit to have her testify before either the Warren Commission, or the House Select Committee on Assassinations (although both investigations mention her). According to friends, she began toying with the idea of writing a book on the assassination as early as 1979, but never got the chance to start.
How did she die? While riding her motorcycle, Conforto got smashed into a school bus by an automobile. As far as I know, no one was apprehended or charged in her death.
US Representative Thomas Hale Boggs, Sr. (1914-c. 1972)
Who the hell is he? US Congressman, a friend of Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison, and the lone dissenting member of the Warren Commission.
What could he say? As a member of the Warren Commission, he knew that its findings contradicted the actual evidence. Moreover, he could speak in great detail about the politics of the Commission, and its need to pin the blame solely on Lee Oswald, despite the fact that they had poor evidence to convict him.
Boggs convinced his friend, Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison, to reopen his investigation of the JFK assassination. Boggs clearly gave him inside information about the Commission, prompting Garrison to falsely attribute his inspiration to reopen the case to the conjecture of another friend, Senator Russell Long.
How did he die? Bogg’s airplane disappeared over Alaska on October 16, 1972. His family got a court to declare him dead in January the following year.
Marilyn Moon Walle (aka Marilyn Moon, Delilah, April Walle, Marilyn Magyar, Miranda; 1939-1966)
Who the hell is she? Exotic dancer; regularly performed at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club.
What could she say? She and others saw Ruby and Oswald interact a number of times at the Carousel Club. According to friends, she planned on writing a book about the JFK assassination at the time of her death.
How did she die? Shot to death. Authorities arrested, prosecuted and convicted her husband for the slaying, sentencing him to twenty years. The House Select Committee on Assassinations found no causal link between her death and the JFK assassination.
How did he die? Authorities ruled his death a suicide. According to his parents, Bogard went into a deep funk a couple of months before he died. He borrowed a garden hose from them the night of his passing. He apparently connected it the tailpipe of his car, and used it to pump the exhaust into the window. Bogard died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the gate of a local cemetery. Interestingly, police found numerous newspaper clippings dealing with the JFK assassination stuffed into the trunk of his vehicle.
Deputy Edward Walthers (aka Buddy; 1929-1969)
Who the hell is he? Dallas County Deputy Sheriff on patrol of Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. The first official to interview shooting victim, James Tague.
What could he say? Walthers could have talked about his relationship with Jack Ruby, for starters (according to researcher Michael Benson, Jack Ruby had, at the time of his arrest, a permanent free pass to the Carousel made out to Walthers). The deputy could also clarify whether or not he found a bullet embedded into the sidewalk beneath the triple overpass framing Dealey Plaza. He first clamed that he handed a bullet (specifically, a .45) to men whom he believed were FBI or CIA. He later insisted that it wasn’t a bullet, but instead a piece of President Kennedy’s brain. If he did find an actual bullet, that would put another stake in the heart of the Magic Bullet Theory.
How did he die? Walthers was slain during the course of a police shootout. According to fellow cop and JFK assassination witness Roger Craig, Walthers had a reputaton as a brown-noser who kept getting promotions despite his incompetence. This has led some to speculate that Walthers died as a result of ‘friendly fire.’
Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer, USN (1917-1966)
Who the hell is he? A career naval veteran, and witness to the JFK autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD.
What could he say? As the naval officer charged with taking photographs of the autopsy, he could immediately tell that those released to the Warren Commission (and subsequently through the public) were either forgeries, or taken by someone else who had tampered with the President’s corpse. According to his family, he had copies of the original motion picture film and stills in his possession at the time of his death.
How did he die? Authorities say that Pitzer committed suicide by shooting himself in the right temple. There are a couple of problems with this explanation, however. First off, the Lt. Cmdr was a left-hander. Secondly, there were no powder burns on his scalp, which means he would have had to have held the gun some distance away from his head--a possible, but extremely awkward way to commit suicide, especially with one’s weak hand.
Dr. Nicholas Chetta (1918-1968)
Who the hell is he? Coroner, Orleans Parish
What could he say? Dr. Chetta vigorously investigated the death of David Ferrie. When testifying at Clay Shaw’s hearing in 1968, he had not yet determined whether Ferrie’s death resulted from homicide, suicide, or natural causes. It’s possible that he might have made a determination by the time of Shaw’s trial in 1969. Because of witnesses (e.g., Perry Russo) linking Shaw and Ferrie, were Dr. Chetta to rule the latter’s death a homicide, it would not look good for the defense.
How did he die? Heart attack. Citing the work of other researchers, the House Select Committee on Assassinations notes the belief that someone murdered Dr. Chetta’s, but makes no further comment on the matter.
Clay Shaw (aka Clay Bertrand; 1913-1974?)
Who the hell is he? Businessman, secret agent and defendant.
What could he say? Shaw’s involvement with the JFK assassination began with the disclosure of his alias, Clay Bertrand, to the Warren Commission. Some ’debunkers’ would like to say that Bertrand and Shaw are not the same man, but we have good reason to believe that they were. Perry Russo, an associate of Shaw’s, knew that Bertrand was Shaw, and told DA Jim Garrison so. More important, upon his arrest for the murder of JFK, Shaw told New Orleans Police Department officer Aloysius Habighorst, during routine questioning, that he used the alias Clay Bertrand. Habighorst dutifully typed the datum onto his booking card, which Shaw looked over and signed.
During his 1968 pre-trial hearing, Shaw’s attorneys argued that Habighorst’s testimony and the booking card shouldn’t be admitted into evidence because the defendant’s attorney wasn’t present at the time he gave the information, and only had one foot in the door of the room where Shaw signed his card. Ultimately, the court ruled that Shaw didn’t have adequate knowledge of his right to silence, and thus ruled the information inadmissible.
Shaw told NBC News that he had never been a contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. He lied. Former DCI Richard Helms testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Shaw indeed had been a CIA contract agent at the time of the JFK assassination. Moreover, former CIA Assistant to the Executive Officer Victor Marchetti said that CIA went all out to assist Shaw’s defense.
Because of his connection to Oswald (as established by the Warren Commission), and because of eyewitness testimony connecting him to Guy Banister, David Ferrie and other players in the conspiracy, we would have to suspect that Clay Shaw could have said just about anything about the JFK assassination.
How did he die? Lung cancer. But according to some, the cancer story served as a ruse to obfuscate his change of identity. Some have claimed that neighbors saw men in black taking a dead body up the outside steps to Shaw’s apartment, apparently in an attempt to substitute the corpse for the former spy.
Such reports are sketchy at best, and hardly proof. And because of his deteriorating condition, observed by friends and family, it seems obvious that Shaw actually died from lung cancer. Whether or not the cancer might have been artificially induced or not remains a separate question.
