Blogs Cliopatria Mel Ayton: Review of Joan Mellen’s A Farewell To Justice – Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And The Case That Should Have Changed History

Nov 28, 2005

Mel Ayton: Review of Joan Mellen’s A Farewell To Justice – Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And The Case That Should Have Changed History

by Cliopatria

Mr. Ayton is the author of The JFK Assassination: Dispelling the Myths (2002) and Questions Of Controversy: The Kennedy Brothers (2001). His new book, A Racial Crime - James Earl Ray and the Murder of Martin Luther King Jr., was published in the United States by ArcheBooks in January 2005.

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his investigation into the JFK assassination by exposing alleged contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. Joan Mellen asserts that Oswald was no Marxist and was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to discredit Garrison’s investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Mellen claims to have uncovered new evidence establishing the intelligence agencies’ roles in both a president’s assassination and its cover-up. She believes the cover-up began well before the assassination. Oswald, she alleges, was closely connected to CIA-sponsored anti-Castro figures in New Orleans who included Clay Shaw, David Ferrie private investigator Guy Banister and his associate Jack Martin.

Central to Mellen’s thesis is her assertion that the CIA and FBI worked with the conspirators to cover up the assassination.The massive cover-up began, Mellen posits, when Oswald, in the company of Shaw and Ferrie, applied for a job at the mental hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. According to Garrison, conspirators wanted Oswald working at the hospital so they could later switch his records to support a frame-up in which Oswald would be characterized as a mental patient. On the strength of an interview with anti-Cuban exile Angelo Murgado (alias Angelo ‘Kennedy’) she also alleges – most strikingly of all - that Robert Kennedy was aware of Oswald and his connection to the FBI before the assassination. RFK purportedly put Oswald under surveillance and had his Cuban associates tracking Oswald's movements during the summer of 1963.

On ‘Black Op Radio’ (Show 234, 2005), Mellen stated that, in March 1967 it was her to-be- husband, Ralph Schoenman (- a JFK conspiracy advocate and committed Marxist), who gave Jim Garrison the now infamous articles about Clay Shaw that had been published in the Italian newspaper ‘ Paese Sera’. The articles stated that Shaw had been on the board of directors of an organisation in Rome which the articles alleged had been a CIA front. As Max Holland has demonstrated, the evidence indicates that these articles convinced Garrison that Shaw was a CIA agent and that the agency was behind the assassination.

Despite Max Holland’s debunking of the Italian newspaper’s stories in his article ‘The Lie That Linked The CIA To The Kennedy Assassination’ Mellen unashamedly gives credence to their distorted facts. As Max Holland wrote, ‘Paese Sera’s successful deception turns out to be a major reason why many Americans believe, to this day, that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.’

Mellen’s ‘proof’ of the invalidity of Holland’s research centers around the simple denials of the editors of Paese Sera who said their reporters were not duped by the KGB and that ‘Garrison had focused on the CIA well before the publication of the Paese Sera articles’.This is a pivotal issue because Garrison, in his memoir ‘On The Trail Of The Assassins’, lied about when he received the articles; that lie suggests the true significance of these articles to him. Moreover, the articles were NOT already in the works long before Shaw’s arrest, as Mellen claims, on the basis of interviews conducted by the aforementioned Ralph Schoenman. It was Shaw’s arrest that prompted those stories. And Garrison only knew of the alleged CIA/Shaw connection through the newspaper articles. Readers should also be aware that the KGB was doing everything in its power to link the JFK assassination with the CIA, and that Paese Sera was an outlet for KGB disinformation, as the recently released Mitrokhin Archive proves.

Branding authors who reject JFK conspiracy theories as 'CIA assets' is Mellen's favourite smear tactic in the book. It is a common tool used by JFK conspiracy writers - it is also 'McCarthyite' in nature. Don Bohning, a former Miami Herald reporter and author of 'The Castro Obsession' (2005) is incensed with references made by Mellen that he was a 'CIA sponsored' reporter. Bohning contacted the book's publishers, suggesting it was libelous. They contacted Mellen and said she agreed to change the description to 'CIA linked.' The reference is still extremely misleading, Bohning said. “ (I)...never took a cent from the CIA and was outraged by the implication - along with the terms 'writer asset' and 'utilized'.” (Email to the author, 3.10.2005)….Top editors at the Herald were well aware – and approved – of my contacts with the CIA during the 1960s.”(Email to the author 9-10-05).

Mellen’s theories, which center around a CIA conspiracy, make little sense once examined closely. Her allegations that Clay Shaw was created and supervised by the CIA have been examined time and time again by JFK researchers and found to be false. In reality, Clay Shaw had simply been one of thousands of businessmen who had once been a source for the CIA through its Domestic Contact Service (DCS). (See John McAdams’s website). Instead, as Patricia Lambert has proven, in a far superior examination of the Garrison case, ‘False Witness’, Shaw was a Kennedy supporter, a decorated war veteran and a gifted intellectual who had rightly been found innocent of the conspiracy charges Garrison made against him.

Mellen’s allegations that the CIA wanted to impede Garrison’s investigation is true but not because the Agency had something sinister to hide. The Agency was in a quandary because of its innocuous relationship with Shaw and it monitored Garrison’s investigation, alarmed that the New Orleans DA was wrongly linking the Agency with the JFK assassination. As Max Holland wrote, “Shaw was not ……developed as a covert operative…. the relationship (with the CIA) just lapsed. He had never received any remuneration and probably considered the reporting a civic duty that was no longer urgent once the hostility between the two superpowers became frozen in place and a new world war no longer appeared imminent…. Garrison’s allegations— the “grossest we have seen from any responsible American official”—gave the Agency fits, just as they did Shaw and Shaw’s lawyers.” (see: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination by Max Holland)

It is difficult to exaggerate the number of previously debunked myths Mellen resurrects.In fact her book is no different from previous JFK conspiracy books which promote theories based on gossip, innuendo and tall tales from unreliable sources. She rehabilitates old shibboleths about the Garrison investigation including the myth that Oswald was in possession of ‘a Minox spy camera’ and Ferrie’s alleged possession of Oswald’s library card both of which have been examined carefully over the years and found to be false. Mellen’s thesis also depends on the veracity of New Orleans ‘character’ Jack Martin and countless other actors in the New Orleans ‘drama’ whose stories have been fully researched. There are too many to cover in this book review but the following are examples as to the lengths to which this author will go in building her conspiracy tale.

Mellen recycles as if true the testimony of witnesses who were discredited before the Shaw case came to trial in 1969, or who were never called to testify precisely because they lacked credibility. She apparently assumes that readers will not know that these witnesses were discredited. Her ‘new’ revelations almost always center around the tales told by anti-Cuban exiles and others on the periphery like Thomas Edward Beckham, a semi-literate who claims, along with dozens of other fantasists, to have observed Ferrie, Oswald and Ruby together; Richard Case Nagell and Jules Rico Kimble, known liars and fantasists, (see http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/nagell1.htm )

Mellen also plays the conspiracists’ game of ‘A knows B who knows C who knows D therefore A must know D’.

One witness who Mellen interviewed is Angelo Murgado, mentioned earlier, who changed his name to ‘Angelo Kennedy’. Angelo purports to have known about RFK’s pre-assassination knowledge of Oswald. Yet Don Bohning’s Cuban exile contacts in Florida have poured scorn on Murgado’s credibility. (email to the author, 3.10.2005) He joins the battalions of ‘soldier of fortune’ types who have, for 40 years, claimed some knowledge of the JFK assassination – all of them supplying no credible evidence of their participation whatsoever.

The most important witness in the trial of Clay Shaw, was Perry Raymond Russo and Garrison's case was built around Russo's testimony. According to Mellen, Russo was truthful - but the facts reveal otherwise. Russo began recanting his conspiracy stories almost immediately, beginning in 1967 to his polygraph examiners. In 1971, Russo recanted to Clay Shaw’s attorneys, admitting to them that he was coached, brainwashed and hypnotized into lying under oath. In the mid-1990’s, shortly before his death from a heart attack, he recanted again, this time to author Patricia Lambert.

A particularly glaring example of the kind of distortions Mellen routinely engages in concerns a CIA officer named Joseph James Martin. Mellen cites CIA documents about him, and alleges he is identical to the ‘Jack Martin’ who was an associate of Guy Banister. It is a preposterous claim when the full CIA record on this issue and Jack Martin’s FBI biography is examined. Garrison’s initial ideas and actions were based on allegations made by Martin who was frequently characterized by people who knew him as a notorious storyteller. Acting on Martin's stories David William Ferrie, a former airlines pilot who had worked for Carlos Marcello’s lawyer, G. Wray Gill, was put under round the clock surveillance. It was years before Martin's allegations against Ferrie were discovered to be inspired by a long-standing grudge.The mystery is why Garrison, who knew Martin was alcoholic, fabricated information, and had received treatment for mental illness, took his allegations seriously. Hubie Badeux, the former chief of the New Orleans Police Intelligence Division told author Gerald Posner, "[Martin] was goofy to begin with and lied all the time". Badeux said Martin had a reputation for "wild and crazy stories." Jack Martin later claimed, with some justification, that Garrison's investigation was based on “information” he and a friend, David Lewis, "made up".

In constructing her story Mellen takes many leaps of the imagination. For example she states that Oswald wanted to name his first child David, if it was a boy. She then links this fact with the ridiculous assertion that the only ‘David’ in Oswald’s life was David Ferrie. Mellen posits this as proof of Oswald’s connection to the alleged JFK conspirator.This is not analysis but paranoia.

Mellen’s book has the façade of scholarship but it is in fact a hocus pocus act. Many of her strongest assertions are not footnoted and thus undocumented. Incredibly, she gives credence to an anonymous telephone call to Garrison in which the caller, allegedly a friend of Shaw’s, said the DA’s suspicions about Shaw were correct. She also ignores documents she doesn’t like, i.e. that contradict her inferences. She claims, without backing it up, that the FBI and CIA files are ‘papered’, which presumably means they contain false documents. She also claims that incriminating documents were destroyed. Yet she also (mis)uses CIA and FBI documents to ‘make’ her case when it suits her purpose. She has created a researcher’s ‘perfect universe’.Documents she doesn’t like are inserted concoctions, and important documents that would prove her allegations are missing (though she purports to know their contents)..One wonders why she bothers with documents at all. The answer is it gives her book a façade of accuracy.

People who want to believe Mellen doubtless will, but those who are at least a little skeptical should read Patricia Lambert’s book ‘False Witness’. Lambert meticulously traces Garrison's story from the very beginning of his investigation, through the Shaw trial and its aftermath. She provides compelling evidence that Jim Garrison's case against Shaw was non-existent, and that Garrison himself was a reckless, mentally unstable demagogue.

Mellen’s book is typical of many conspiracy books in that the impact of her tome depends on the reader having little independent knowledge of the facts of the case or the dramatis personae in this shocking tale of the abuse of a District Attorney’s power. Judged on its merits, the book should have no impact on the history of the JFK Assassination .

In November 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board, instituted by Congress as a result of public pressure after the release of the movie 'JFK', released Clay Shaw's secret diary. In it he wrote of being wrongly persecuted, "I am still dismayed to find myself charged with the most heinous crime of the century but I am completely innocent and the feeling of being a stunned animal seems to have gone now." In another section of Shaw's diary he wrote about his feelings of being accused of having associated with Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, "Aside from any questions of guilt or innocence,” wrote Shaw, “anyone who knows me knows that I would have better sense than to plot with two nuts like that."

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Mark E. Bates - 3/26/2007

Comment removed by HNN Editor 3/26/07.

Mel Ayton - 10/9/2006

A review an Amazon.com:

<quote on>

This book is Terrible and I should know, September 10, 2006
Reviewer: Stephen S. Jaffe "I...@stevejaffepr.com" (Beverly Hills, CA
USA) - See all my reviews

Author Joan Mellen asked me if she could interview me for a book on
Jim Garrison, the former DA of New Orleans who investigated the
assassination of JFK. I worked for Garrison as a photo-analyst. Joan
Mellen spent hours interviewing me in my home. I gave her information
that had never been seen or revealed. She distorted the information
and attacked me on a personal level though she never indicated that
she was going to do that, I suppose because she thought I wouldn't
grant her an interview. While I respected and admired Garrison's work,
Mellen attributed to me things I never said. She annotated some of her
statements but not some that were attacks on me. How serious can you
take a book written by someone so irresponsibly?

--
The Kennedy Assassination Home Page
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm

Mel Ayton - 2/13/2006

Mellen's friends - let the reader decide who is correct - Holland or Mellen.
http://paulmitchinson.com/archives/107

Peter R McGuire - 2/8/2006

I mean Max Holland is writing disinformation for the CIA in The Nation. No one believes the Warren Commission so why do we need to be insulted by this man? Keep writing the truth, Mr Aguilar.

Peter R McGuire - 2/8/2006

disinformation

Gary L. Aguilar - 12/18/2005

To read Mr. Ayton's comments is to gain insight into why such a tiny minority believes the Warren Commission.

Mr. Ayton lashes Warren skeptics for not documenting their claims, then, as anyone reading our exchanges will see, proceeds to make some preposterous and grand claims of his own and never offers any documentation whatsoever.

And as our exchanges also show, when confronted with writings that are supported with abundant documentation, or documented refutations of his codswollop, he goes suddenly mum.

One of Mr. Ayton's heroes is Max Holland, a self-admitted plagiarist whose CIA-published theory is debunked by the historical record. I proved that with solid documentation and, true to form, Mr. Ayton went mum.

Another of Mr. Ayton's heroes is Richard Helms of the CIA, who was convicted of lying to the Senate about the role the CIA played in toppling Chile's democracy on 9/11 - 1973, that is. Helms also was the instigator and chief supporter of the MKULTRA Program, in which unwitting, non-volunteer Americans were picked up off the streets of America and subjected to dangerous human experiments with mind-altering drugs.
[See: http://www.angelfire.com/or/mctrl/bastion.html]

I proved with solid documentation that Mr. Ayton's hero Helms was an ex-con and, again, Mr. Ayton went mum.

So Mr. Ayton is finally throwing in the towel, is he? But not before slinging a final slug of mud, calling me a "conspiracy fanatic." Judging from what he's written, he's no doubt doing that because he believes it is *beneath contempt* to use "smear tactics."

The only thing that will be missed after Mr. Ayton's departure is the humor in his hilarious, and unwitting, self-mockery.

And to think that I once believed that the only Brit who played poodle dog to American thuggery was Tony Blair.

The next time the USA needs a Brit to sing the praises of another Agency cove who is convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors, I know just whom they should call.

Gary Aguilar

Mel Ayton - 12/17/2005

Aguilar still doesn't get it. It would be pointless to continue as he is clearly a JFK conspiracy fanatic who is unwilling to see reason.
Readers might find the following article useful.
http://home.comcast.net/~dperry1943/mellen.html

Gary L. Aguilar - 12/17/2005

To read Mr. Mel Ayton is to understand why the vast majority, both here in America and abroad, have rightly rejected the Warren Commission’s no conspiracy verdict.

Below, I’ve pasted Mr. Ayton’s latest ill-considered comments and placed my responses in brackets.

Once more Aguilar dances around important errors in Mellen’s book by building a smokescreen of personal attacks. He still insists that Mellen was correct in accusing various individuals like Don Bohning of having CIA ‘connections’. He is burying his head in the sand.

[Mr. Ayton's spluttering is perhaps best understood as his having very little to say in his own defense and his saying it very badly.

[The same Mr. Ayton who had repeatedly slung personal slurs such as “smear tactics”, “McCarthyite tactics,” “distortions,” “façade of scholarship,” “a hocus pocus act,” etc., etc. denounces me for, what else?, “personal attacks!”

[The same Mel Ayton who lashed Mellen because, he said, “ Many of her strongest assertions are not footnoted and thus undocumented,” responds to my thoroughly documented ripostes not with the sorts of documentation he demands of Mellen, but with insulting personal asides and unsourced grand generalizations.

[The plain fact is that no credible documentation exists to support his wild claims and so he has no other choice but to respond as he does. But he does have the option of behaving civilly, an option he does not take.]

*Aguilar’s information about Max Holland is a non sequitur. Aguilar would rather believe a charlatan and liar like Garrison than this respected writer and author.

[The same Mr. Ayton who demands documentation from Mellen, responds to my documented debunking of Holland’s silly thesis and my documentation that Holland is a plagiarist not with any facts, but by an appeal to authority. He says that there are those who respect Holland. Ergo, the factually flawed underpinnings of an admitted plagiarist’s thesis should be ignored and all should rally round the plagiarist! In other words, Mr. Ayton suggests we ignore inconvenient facts and embrace proper authority, however false.]

*I would point the reader to works by authors Evan Thomas, Peter Grose, Christopher Andrew and Thomas Powers to gain an insight into how the CIA worked in the 1960s and their methods of giving out code names to anyone they contacted on a regular basis.

[Still fuming over Mellen’s discovery that former Miami Herald reporter Don Bohning “had received his Provisional Covert Security Approval as a CIA confidential informant on 8/21/67;” “then Covert Security Approval itself on 11/14/67,” and that no less than the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans himself “approved the use of Bohning in the CIA’s Cuban operations,”[1]]

[Mr. Ayton responds not by refuting the findings. He says instead that nearly everyone the CIA came into contact got the Bohning treatment. And he “proves” it with “documentation,” too.

[He drops the names of a few credible authors, including Evan Thomas, Peter Grose, Christopher Andrew [well maybe *he’s* not so credible] and Thomas Powers. But he never gives a specific title or page number. I am pretty familiar with what these fellows have written and I have several of their books in my personal library. I defy Mr. Ayton to produce a specific quote proving that “nearly everyone” was treated as Bohning was. He just can’t do it. Hence, his sputtering bitterness.]

*Yes, Mr Aguilar, Mellen does indeed claim that Jack Martin was a CIA agent, specifically ‘a low-ranking intelligence assistant’ and that he was the same person as John J. Martin who in turn is the same person as ‘Joseph James Martin’. Mellen is incorrect and this fact alone destroys her thesis.

[The same Mr. Ayton who sneers at imprecision and verbal slovenliness says that a “CIA agent” is the same thing as a “low-ranking intelligence assistant.” As usual, he’s completely wrong.]

*Aguilar, ‘an eye doctor’ for want of a better description, needs to destroy the credibility of Patricia Lambert before he can persuade others of his preposterous claims.He does this by asking if she is a ‘recognised academic’ or ‘have proper reportorial credentials’. Such sneering is beneath contempt.

[The same Mr. Ayton who sneers that I am merely “’an eye doctor’ for want of a better description,” says my questioning Patricia Lambert’s apparently unremarkable reportorial credentials is “beneath contempt.” And it’s the same Mr. Ayton who dodges the fact-checking I’ve done on his favorite plagiarist, Max Holland, who he would prefer not be known for plagiarized falsehoods. Apparently Mr. Ayton believes that it is “beneath contempt” to fact-check Warrenistas, but not skeptics.

[And although entirely irrelevant to the issues under discussion, Mr. Ayton is indeed correct that I’m an “eye doctor.” It’s my familiarity with the JFK case that’s pertinent, however. I happen also to be one of the only non-government physicians ever allowed by the Kennedy family and the U.S. government to examine the still-restricted, original JFK medical and autopsy materials.

[Among my writings on that subject is an essay published at historymatters.com entitled, “How Five Investigations into JFK’s Medical/Autopsy Evidence Got It Wrong.”[2] I also wrote a 16-page piece published in the peer-review journal Neurosurgery in the September 2005 issue.[3]

[I hope that my writings satisfy Mr. Ayton’s fastidiousness about the importance of (Warren skeptics’, but not Warren loyalists’) providing thorough documentation. The 16-page piece I wrote with Cyril Wecht, MD, JD is supported by over 90 citations, most of them government documents that are available on-line by merely clicking the hotlink provided in the footnote. And my historymatters.com essay has almost 400 footnotes, also hot-linked to mostly government documents.]

End of point-counterpoint

Tallying up, the current status of Mr. Ayton’s spirited defense of the CIA against Joan Mellen remains unchanged and is as follows:

1. Mr. Ayton’s most-quoted source is an article published by the CIA and written by an author, Max Holland, who plagiarized the central thesis that lies at the heart of the article in question. Mr. Ayton has yet to acknowledge or address these known facts or offer a compelling reason why we should accept CIA apologia published by the CIA and authored by a plagiarist.

2. “Max Holland’s” thesis that the only reason Garrison suspected the CIA was because he believed KGB disinformation that had been planted in the Rome daily, Il Paese Sera, is refuted by the contemporaneous record.

3. Much of the “proof” Il Paese Sera was an outlet of the KGB depends on the word of a CIA agent who was later convicted of lying to the U.S. Senate, Richard Helms.

4. Mr. Ayton offers no evidence to back up his claim that, “the (Il Paese Sera) articles were NOT (sic) already in the works long before Shaw’s arrest, as Mellen claims … It was Shaw’s arrest that prompted [Il Paese Sera to write] those stories.” Those assertions are just that, unproven, undocumented and false assertions. They have been specifically denied by the editors of Il Paese Sera who have a better record of truth-telling than the source Ayton credits, the convicted liar, Richard Helms.

5. The CIA used Clay Shaw as much more than just a source of intelligence. He had been cleared for an “operational project” – “QKENCHANT (which) authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist ‘civilians,’ people not officially with the Agency, to discuss ‘projects, activities and possible relationships.” Thus, Shaw’s CIA role was far greater than Ayton implies – a passive conduit for intelligence gathered during Shaw’s travels abroad.

6. Clay Shaw lied under oath in denying his Agency affiliation.

7. Seasoned homicide investigator L. J. Delsa regards Tomas Edward Beckham as a credible witness and is confident that Jack Martin was a part of the CIA-FBI nexus in New Orleans. Mr. Ayton has no credentials as a homicide investigator and offers no compelling reasons to abide his view of Beckham and Martin over that of an experienced, U.S. Government investigator.

That so few people believe the Warren Commission should be proudly hailed as evidence of the good judgment of the world’s population. It is unfortunate that the public’s disbelief creates such bitterness among some of the few who still cling to so many silly myths, including Max Holland's fantasy that the Warren Commission was a “a monumental criminal investigation carried to its utmost limits.”[4] That seminal myth was demolished more than 25 years ago not only by astute Warren skeptics, but also by the seasoned criminal investigators who worked for both the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.[5]

Gary Aguilar, San Francisco

[1] Joan Mellen. A Farewell to Justice. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005, p. 253.

[2] http://history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong.htm

[3] Gary L. Aguilar; Cyril H. Wecht; Rex Bradford, A Neuroforensic Analysis of the Wounds of President John F. Kennedy: Part 2-A Study of the Available Evidence, Eyewitness Correlations, Analysis, and Conclusions. On-line at: http://www.neurosurgery-online.com/pt/re/neurosurg/toc.00006123-200509000-00000.htm;jsessionid=DieGpoABzvanXVVVzBYXwQjNabIlS89E2r20g5Xd30zXJKiwElKw!-85436088!-949856145!9001!-1

[4] Max Holland. The Key to the Warren Report. American Heritage Magazine. November, 1995, p. 64.

[5]Gary Aguilar. "Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and The Nation." From the September-October 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 6)

Mel Ayton - 12/15/2005

Once more Aguilar dances around important errors in Mellen’s book by building a smokescreen of personal attacks. He still insists that Mellen was correct in accusing various individuals like Don Bohning of having CIA ‘connections’. He is burying his head in the sand.

Aguilar, like Mellen, swamps the reader with a wealth of irrelevant detail (and posts twice as if this would grab the attention of the reader). To avoid making the same mistake I will be very succinct with my responses:

*Aguilar’s information about Max Holland is a non sequitur. Aguilar would rather believe a charlatan and liar like Garrison than this respected writer and author.

*Aguilar is disingenuous in saying he did not charge the CIA with complicity in the assassination. Yet he supports Mellen whose central thesis is just that.

*I would point the reader to works by authors Evan Thomas, Peter Grose, Christopher Andrew and Thomas Powers to gain an insight into how the CIA worked in the 1960s and their methods of giving out code names to anyone they contacted on a regular basis.

*Yes, Mr Aguilar, Mellen does indeed claim that Jack Martin was a CIA agent, specifically ‘a low-ranking intelligence assistant’ and that he was the same person as John J. Martin who in turn is the same person as ‘Joseph James Martin’. Mellen is incorrect and this fact alone destroys her thesis.

*Aguilar, like Mellen, puts great faith in known liars like Thomas Edward Beckham. As Patricia Lambert discovered, Beckham was a “...scam artist.....who told a 1968 grand jury he knew nothing about the crime. Nevertheless, by 1977 he had a ...300-page manuscript about the assassination....After taking his deposition, the (HSCA) committee quickly lost interest...Beckham was schooled only through the third grade and spent time in mental institutions on at least three occasions. (Mellen claims the latter was a CIA setup, but Beckham’s deposition suggests otherwise)...In 1992 he had changed his name some eight times, according to writer Gus Russo, who tracked him down at his home in Louisville, Kentucky, and recently recalled the encounter....(Russo said) “Beckham basically acknowledged to me being what most people would call a flimflam artist—I remember he pointed to his office walls. They were filled with bogus diplomas from every major university; he was selling them and cheap trinkets, like whoopee cushions, for a living. . . He told me he not only recorded but wrote three Number One hits, which he named — “From a Jack to a King” was one. When I told him that I was a former professional musician and recited the names of the real composers, he laughed and said, ‘Well, I can’t fool you’ . . . For anyone to use him as a source for anything is staggering’.... In Mellen’s view, it was the president’s assassination that set Beckham on the “wandering life of a con man.” But Beckham was conning people before then: In 1962 he was “wearing a Roman collar” and “soliciting money” as a Catholic priest (for “Cuban revolutionary forces,” according to him).”

*Aguilar, ‘an eye doctor’ for want of a better description, needs to destroy the credibility of Patricia Lambert before he can persuade others of his preposterous claims.He does this by asking if she is a ‘recognised academic’ or ‘have proper reportorial credentials’. Such sneering is beneath contempt.

Reading books that attack innocent people as having had some kind of participation in the assassination or its purported cover-up (eg Don Bohning, Max Holland, Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips and Johann Rush) I am reminded of a famous statement made by lawyer Joseph N. Welch in response to an attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Welch said, “Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel......have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Gary L. Aguilar - 12/14/2005

Mr. Ayton’s response appears to have been crafted with little care and in great haste. Below, in brackets, I’ve responded to his comments, which appear without brackets. At the end I’ve included a tally summarizing the current status of our discussion.

Aguilar begins with a non sequitur - that Max Hollands’ (sic) article was published by the CIA.

[Mr. Ayton’s logic escapes me. Where is the non sequitur in my starting off my response by noting the irony of his offering work published by the CIA to refute Mellen’s allegations about the CIA? Is it non sequitur to wonder whether the CIA-published plagiarist Mr. Ayton defers to is a disinterested source in a discussion about the CIA? If Mr. Ayton had cited the plagiarized work of a cove published by the Communist Party USA to refute charges the CPUSA had conspired against capitalism, would he recognize the irony if I pointed that out to him?]

He continues with another non sequitur by declaring that Holland’s Paese Sera information was not new.

[Mr. Ayton apparently did not read what I wrote with much care for he has confused the sequence of my comments. After noting that the CIA published the article he cites defending the CIA, I next said that Holland refused to defend “his” CIA-abetted thesis in a debate in which that very thesis was the proposition on the table. It was at this point that I pointed out that Holland’s “discovery” isn’t Holland’s; he plagiarized it from an article published by Lobster Magazine in 1983.

[More importantly, and I hope that it reflects only Mr. Ayton’s haste and not his usual modus operandi, he ignored the reasons I gave for rejecting “Holland’s” thesis – that the stories in “Il Paese Sera” were the sole reason Garrison suspected the CIA – have nothing to do with the fact they are “not new.” Nor are they even related to Holland’s unseemly act, or even to Mr. Ayton’s faith in a plagiriast. Holland’s theory is bogus because both pro- and anti-conspiracy authors published accounts that were contemporaneous with the Shaw trial in which Garrison laid out the many reasons he had for suspecting The Agency, reasons that had nothing to do with what was in “Il Paese Sera.”

[Since he apparently missed it the first time, let me repeat myself:

[“As Edward Epstein has pointed out, during his twenty-six-page interview in Playboy Magazine’s October 1967 issue, Garrison’s most comprehensive review of his case that year, the D.A. ticked off eight reasons to suspect the CIA. None of them included Il Paese Sera or the subject of the articles, the still-mysterious Rome World Trade Center, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). [1] Nor did he even mention Clay Shaw, although perhaps because of the pending legal wrangle. [2] Moreover, Garrison wrote the foreword to Harold Weisberg’s 1967-published book, entitled “Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the CIA.” (my emphasis) Despite the perfect opportunity, as with Playboy, Garrison again uttered not a word about Il Paese Sera, Shaw or the CMC. [3]

[“Finally, it is unhelpful for the central role Holland and Ayton have the Rome daily playing that Garrison never once cited or referred to those reports during the Shaw trial. Nor did he even use them as a basis for questioning Shaw. He never asked Shaw, for example, whether he had worked for CMC or for the CIA, both of which were the focus of all six stories. [4]”

[Mr. Ayton is of course free to believe whatever he wishes. But I hope he won’t take offense if I ask him why anyone besides him should ignore the many non-Il Paese Sera reasons Garrison gave in 1967 to suspect the CIA and accept instead that Il Paese Sera was the only reason Garrison had just because a CIA-published plagiarist says so.]

Aguilar is apparently unaware these add nothing to his claims that the CIA was behind the murder of JFK or that my criticisms of Mellen’s book are anything but correct.

[Even a careless reading of my comments proves I said did not say that “the CIA was behind the murder of JFK.” For the record, I have no idea who *was behind* it. Mellen points out what academics have noted for a long time: the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the case. (A recent convert to the view of CIA skullduggery is no less than the House Select Committee’s Chief Counsel, Notre Dame Law Professor, Robert Blakey. [5]) But I’ve never offered an opinion about who was really *behind* it and what role(s) the CIA might have played. Again, I hope this error reflects Mr. Ayton’s haste, not his disregard for truth.]

It comes as no surprise that Max Holland refused to rise to Aguilar’s ‘Paesa Sera’ taunts during the Washington ‘Assassination Archives’ meeting. Aguilar and other conspiracy advocates of his kind tend to make outrageous charges and ignore solid facts when debating the alleged JFK ‘conspiracy’. They cloud the issues with irrelevancies, gossip and innuendo and when they fail to convince they use their favorite weapon – smearing non-conspiracy authors as ‘CIA assets’ … Therefore Holland’s decision was probably wise, ergo, stay out of the gutter and refuse to engage with people who turn black into white and white into black. You cannot argue rationally with irrational people.

[Mr. Ayton’s knowledge is no match for his passion. Making outrageous charges and ignoring solid facts to prove I’ve made outrageous charges and ignored solid facts, Mr. Ayton’s hilarious mischaracterizations prove he knows absolutely nothing about what actually transpired during my debate with Max Holland.

[It wasn’t at all that Max Holland “refused to rise” to my “‘Pasea Sera’ taunts,” so he could “stay out of the gutter.” He [and I, both] accepted an invitation beforehand to speak on the topic, as stated in the published program, “Was Garrison Duped by the KGB?” This isn’t much subject to dispute, since that title was listed on the program that was disseminated well before the conference and it is still available for viewing on the web in pdf format. [6]

[And Mr. Holland did indeed rise, all right, quite willingly, too. He spoke for about 25 minutes. But he studiously avoided the proposition on the table, i.e., the proposition at the heart of “his” thesis. He argued instead, and irrelevantly, that Garrison had “lied” when he said he only heard about “Il Paesa Sera” after the Shaw trial. Holland’s dubious substitution, also, isn’t much subject to debate. I have a copy of the C-SPAN DVD of our exchange and will gladly wager whatever sum Mr. Ayton believes would make it worth his while to establish who is making outrageous charges and ignoring solid facts.

[If only for the sake of the few who still share his faith in the Warren Commission, one can only hope that the facts Mr. Ayton presents in his anti-conspiracy books stand up better than those he’s given here.]

Aguilar repeats Mellen’s charge that Don Bohning had been working for the CIA. It is, in short, a lie and I believe Bohning deserves an apology.Aguilar is probably unaware that the CIA always covered their tracks (sic) by giving cryptonyms to nearly everyone they came into contact with. It was simply their way of working. This CIA ‘modus operandi’ was completely out of Bohning’s control. Furthermore, to claim that the Miami Herald’s approval of Bohning’s CIA contacts ‘compounds the problem’ is simply ridiculous.

[The Englishman Mr. Ayton is apparently extraordinarily well informed about CIA operations. I’m keen to see his proof that The Agency “covered their tracks” by “giving cryptonyms to nearly everyone they came in contact with.” And I’m keen to learn how passing cryptonyms out to nearly everyone helps the CIA “cover their tracks?”

[And what about the rest of Mellen’s intriguing discovery? Namely, that Bohning “had received his Provisional Covert Security Approval as a CIA confidential informant on 8/21/67;” “then Covert Security Approval itself on 11/14/67.” And that no less than the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans himself “approved the use of Bohning in the CIA’s Cuban operations.” [7] Does/did the CIA bless everyone it comes/came in contact with “Provisional Covert Security Approval” or “Covert Security Approval” as a “CIA confidential informant?” And does the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans himself approve the use of “nearly everyone” it is in contact with? Some proof of that would be welcome, too, proof that consists of more than the personal assurances of a British citizen.]

It is telling that Aguilar does not comment on the most outrageous of Mellen’s claims – that Jack Martin was a CIA agent – probably because he realises it cannot be challenged. He also needs to address the claims made by Patricia Lambert in her stinging attack on Mellen’s book – see http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/mellen.htm. Until he does his argument that Mellen’s book provides the ‘truth’ about the JFK assassination will continue to invite ridicule.

[Mr. Ayton misstates Mellen. Mellen never called Martin a “CIA agent.” She said that Jack Martin was inextricably intertwined with myriad Agency-associated individuals and that he appeared to be one and the same as John. J. Martin, a former “CIA employee.” As everyone knows, all Agency employees aren’t necessarily “agents.” But recently Joan learned that there is a conflict in the dates Jack Martin and John J. Martin died, either due to an error in the reported dates or to an error that the men were not one and the same individual.

[Whether Jack and John J. are in fact the same person does not alter Jack Martin’s fascinating history and mysterious I.D. On that question Mr. Ayton and the seasoned homicide investigator, and former HSCA investigator, L. J. Delsa, disagree. Mellen tells me that Delsa is certain that Jack Martin was part of the FBI-CIA matrix in New Orleans. For example, a call to the phone number printed on Martin’s business card rang in the offices of Guy Banister, who was the paymaster for CIA anti-Castro training camps at lake Ponchtrain. Martin’s named business associates, William Dalzell and Joseph Newbrough, had clear CIA connections as well. [8] And I’ll leave it to the reader to pick through Martin’s other interesting intelligence associations. ]

End of point-counterpoint

Tallying up, the current status of Mr. Ayton’s spirited defense of the CIA against Joan Mellen is as follows:

1. Mr. Ayton’s most-quoted source is an article published by the CIA and written by an author, Max Holland, who plagiarized the central thesis that lies at the heart of the article in question. Mr. Ayton has yet to acknowledge or address these known facts.
2. “Max Holland’s” thesis that the only reason Garrison suspected the CIA was because he believed KGB disinformation that had been planted in the Rome daily, Il Paese Sera, is refuted by the contemporaneous record.
3. Much of the “proof” Il Paese Sera was an outlet of the KGB depends on the word of a CIA agent who was later convicted of lying to the U.S. Senate, Richard Helms.
4. Mr. Ayton offers no evidence to back up his claim that, “the (Il Paese Sera) articles were NOT (sic) already in the works long before Shaw’s arrest, as Mellen claims … It was Shaw’s arrest that prompted [Il Paese Sera to write] those stories.” Those assertions are just that, assertions, and they have been specifically denied by the editors of Il Paese Sera.
5. The CIA used Clay Shaw as much more than just a source of intelligence. He had been cleared for an “operational project” – “QKENCHANT (which) authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist ‘civilians,’ people not officially with the Agency, to discuss ‘projects, activities and possible relationships.” Thus, Shaw’s CIA role was far greater than Ayton implies – a passive conduit for intelligence gathered during Shaw’s travels abroad.
6. Clay Shaw lied under oath in denying his Agency affiliation.
7. Seasoned homicide investigator L. J. Delsa regards Tomas Edward Beckham as a credible witness and is confident that Jack Martin was a part of the CIA-FBI nexus in New Orleans. Mr. Ayton has no credentials as a homicide investigator and offers no compelling reasons to abide his view of Beckham and Martin over that of an experienced, U.S. Government investigator.

As a final note, Mr. Ayton would have me believe Patricia Lambert. Is she a recognized academic? Does she have proper reportorial credentials? Not that I’m aware of, but I could be wrong. But more to the point, one of Lambert’s own sources, Anne Dischler, has recently claimed that Lambert misrepresented what she told her, putting an anticonspiracy spin on it. As Dischler put it in conversation with Mellen recently, Lambert’s book represented a death while Joan’s book represented a resurrection.

Gary Aguilar

[1] In: The Assassination Chronicles--Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend by Edward J. Epstein. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 250--263.
[2] Playboy interview of Jim Garrison is on-line at: http://www.jfklancer.com/Garrison2.html, ff
[3] Harold Weisberg. Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the C.I.A. New York: Canyon Books, 1967, p. 7--14.]
[4] See the text supported by footnotes 138 to 146 in the essay, “Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and the Nation” by Gary L. Aguilar. Probe Magazine, Sept-Oct. 2000 (vol. 7, No.6)
On-line at: http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr900-holland.html#_edn151

[5] Frontline interview with G. Robert Blakey. On-line at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/interviews/blakey.html
[In the post script at the end of the interview, Blakey says: They were certainly right about one question: the committee's researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency's integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides.
For these reasons, I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald. Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understates the matter.
What the Agency did not give us none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on one point, you may reject all of his testimony.
I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known.
Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.
We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.
Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.
I am now in that camp.
Anyone interested in pursuing this story further should consult the reporting by Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post. See, e.g., Jefferson Morley, "Revelation 19.63" Miami New Times (April 2001).

[6] http://aarclibrary.org/notices/WarrenReportConferenceAgenda.pdf
[7] Joan Mellen. A Farewell to Justice. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005, p. 253.

[8] Joan Mellen. A Farewell to Justice. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005, p. 34-35.

Gary L. Aguilar - 12/14/2005

John Chapman - 12/10/2005

wrote Shaw, “anyone who knows me knows that I would have better sense than to plot with two nuts like that."

Tell them the full story Mr. Shaw.

Mel Ayton - 12/8/2005

Unfortunately, Aguilar adds little to the relevant facts as set out in my article. Indeed, the tone of his reply reveals that Mellen defenders are indeed worried.

Aguilar begins with a non sequitur - that Max Hollands’ article was published by the CIA. He continues with another non sequitur by declaring that Holland’s Paese Sera information was not new. Aguilar is apparently unaware these add nothing to his claims that the CIA was behind the murder of JFK or that my criticisms of Mellen’s book are anything but correct.

It comes as no surprise that Max Holland refused to rise to Aguilar’s ‘Paesa Sera’ taunts during the Washington ‘Assassination Archives’ meeting. Aguilar and other conspiracy advocates of his kind tend to make outrageous charges and ignore solid facts when debating the alleged JFK ‘conspiracy’. They cloud the issues with irrelevancies, gossip and innuendo and when they fail to convince they use their favorite weapon – smearing non-conspiracy authors as ‘CIA assets’. They also tend to believe every type of crackpot who claims to have been a witness to the ‘conspiracy’ - this is exactly the same way Garrison behaved during his ‘investigation’, e.g. Perry Russo. This is exactly what Mellen did when she accepted the stories of numerous ‘soldier-of-fortune’ characters who alleged some kind of involvement in the purported ‘conspiracy’, e.g Angelo Murgado who other contemporaries have described as ‘unbeliveable’ and Thomas Edward Beckham whose story comes straight from the shelves of fiction. She repeated their allegations without asking them to provide any corroboration or ‘proof’ of their involvement in the ‘conspiracy’. Therefore Holland’s decision was probably wise, ergo, stay out of the gutter and refuse to engage with people who turn black into white and white into black.You cannot argue rationally with irrational people.

Perhaps Aguilar should try reading Patricia Lambert’s book about Garrison and then he will discover the New Orleans District Attorney was a notorious liar. There is no credible evidence whatsoever to support Garrison’s theories. Anyone who claims otherwise will need to provide credible evidence – which is unlikely because there isn’t any.

Aguilar repeats Mellen’s charge that Don Bohning had been working for the CIA. It is, in short, a lie and I believe Bohning deserves an apology.Aguilar is probably unaware that the CIA always covered their tracks by giving cryptonyms to nearly everyone they came into contact with. It was simply their way of working. This CIA ‘modus operandi’ was completely out of Bohning’s control. Furthermore, to claim that the Miami Herald’s approval of Bohning’s CIA contacts ‘compounds the problem’ is simply ridiculous.

It is telling that Aguilar does not comment on the most outrageous of Mellen’s claims – that Jack Martin was a CIA agent – probably because he realises it cannot be challenged. He also needs to address the claims made by Patricia Lambert in her stinging attack on Mellen’s book – see http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/mellen.htm. Until he does his argument that Mellen’s book provides the ‘truth’ about the JFK assassination will continue to invite ridicule.

Gary L. Aguilar - 12/8/2005

Who Better to Defend the CIA than the CIA?

Gary Aguilar, San Francisco

Among myriad ironies in Mel Ayton’s review of “A Farewell to Justice,” perhaps the greatest is Mel Ayton’s offering author Max Holland’s CIA-published work as an answer to Joan Mellen’s exhaustive elucidation of the myriad CIA ties to the Kennedy case.

For example, Ayton trots out Holland’s remarkable discovery that the sole reason Jim Garrison had for suspecting the CIA in the events in Dallas was because he’d been duped by fiendishly clever KGB dezinformatsiya planted in a Rome daily, Il Paese Sera. Ayton apparently has more faith in the theory than even its supposed author does. For Holland refused to defend it in a public debate with me last September in Washington, D.C. before a live audience and rolling C-SPAN cameras. [1] On why he might have chosen not to, one scarcely knows where to begin.

But perhaps it’s worth starting with the fact that Holland’s famous breakthrough isn’t Holland’s, something he has never disclosed (apparently even to Ayton), but was forced to admit when I confronted him during our debate. Steve Dorril was the first one to make “Holland’s” argument in an article published by Lobster Magazine in 1983, something Ayton could have easily found in a simple search of the web. [2] “Holland’s” discovery apparently next surfaced when Warren Commission defender, John McAdams, ran it in a 1999 newsgroup post, [3] two years before Holland presented it for the first time.

The “proof” Dorril, McAdams and Holland offered that Il Paese Sera was a communist conduit consisted mostly of testimony the CIA’s Richard Helms delivered during a 1961 Senate appearance. [3] As this author has shown, Helms’s sworn assertions during this 1961 Senate appearance are no more credible than the testimony he gave during another Senate hearing that led to his conviction and the page 1 New York Times headline, “Helms Is Fined $2,000 and Given Two-Year Suspended Prison Term--U.S. Judge Rebukes Ex-C.I.A. Head for Misleading (Senate) Panel.” [4]

Without offering a shred of proof, Ayton recycles Holland’s dubious claim that, “the (Il Paese Sera) articles were NOT (sic) already in the works long before Shaw’s arrest, as Mellen claims … It was Shaw’s arrest that prompted [Il Paese Sera to write] those stories.” How Ayton knows that the articles “were NOT already in the works long before Shaw’s arrest,” he does not say. But had Ayton (or Holland) bothered to contact Il Paese Sera’s editors, they would probably have told him what they have told others: that the six-part series had nothing to do with (and said nothing about) the KGB or the JFK assassination; that they had never heard of Jim Garrison when they assigned the story six months before [which was also six months before Garrison had charged Shaw]; and that they were astonished to see that Shaw might have any connection to the assassination.

Finally, echoing Holland, Ayton claims that the Italian articles were Garrison’s sole reason for suspecting the Agency. If they really were the sole source of his seduction, one would have expected some contemporaneous evidence of it. But there is none.

As Edward Epstein has pointed out, during his twenty-six-page interview in Playboy Magazine’s October 1967 issue, Garrison’s most comprehensive review of his case that year, the D.A. ticked off eight reasons to suspect the CIA. None of them included Il Paese Sera or the subject of the articles, the still-mysterious Rome World Trade Center, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). [5] Nor did he even mention Clay Shaw, although perhaps because of the pending legal wrangle. [6] Moreover, Garrison wrote the foreword to Harold Weisberg’s 1967-published book, entitled “Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the CIA.” (my emphasis) Despite the perfect opportunity, as with Playboy, Garrison again uttered not a word about Il Paese Sera, Shaw or the CMC. [7]

Finally, it is unhelpful for the central role Holland and Ayton have the Rome daily playing that Garrison never once cited or referred to those reports during the Shaw trial. Nor did he even use them as a basis for questioning Shaw. He never asked Shaw, for example, whether he had worked for CMC or for the CIA, both of which were the focus of all six stories. [8]

Ayton next rallied to the defense of a former Miami Herald reporter, Donald Bohning, who Mellen had described as “CIA linked.” In response, Ayton quoted from a complaining email from the man: “(I) never took a cent from the CIA,” Bohning apparently wrote, “and was outraged by the implication – along with the terms ‘writer asset’ and ‘utilized’ … Top editors at the [Miami] Herald were well aware – and approved – of my contacts with the CIA during the 1960s.”

Tellingly, Ayton omits the most damning portion of Mellen’s account. Even if money never changed hands, and Mellen nowhere suggests it did, Bohning’s relationship with The Agency was far from the routine and casual relationship reporters have with government insiders. As Mellen points out, Bohning was apparently so useful to The Agency it gave him his own, unique cryptonym, “AMCARBON-3.” Bohning “had received his Provisional Covert Security Approval as a CIA confidential informant on 8/21/67,” Mellen wrote, “then Covert Security Approval itself on 11/14/67.” And no less than the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans himself “approved the use of Bohning in the CIA’s Cuban operations.” [9]

For those who have forgotten Carl Bernstein’s cautionary tale about the corrosive effect such relationships can have on credible and honest journalism [10], or the New York Times’s Christmas week 1977 mea culpa for having compromised itself and its readers by engaging in similar unhealthy relationships with the CIA, a recent scandal is worth mention.

Judy Miller, the recently disgraced New York Times reporter, was such a darling of the Bush Administration and the military that she was granted a security clearance not unlike Bohning’s. [11] Her bogus, prewar scare stories about the imminence of the Iraqi threat that the “leftist” New York Times published on the front page were a boon to the Neocons in the Bush Administration bent on manufacturing consent for war.

That Bohning’s higher-ups at the Miami Herald knew and approved of his cozy relationship only compounds the impropriety. At least The New York Times’ “top editors” publicly donned hair shirts and apologized to readers for betraying their trust. And not without reason. Bernstein documented that the problem wasn’t the occasional tainting tie between the rare, lowly stringer and the CIA. It was the myriad, compromising arrangements between The Agency and the higher-ups in outfits such as CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L. A. Times, etc. that really took the bark out of our press watchdogs. This is not to say Bohning was corrupt, but that Mellen’s concern is well founded.

Ayton puts Holland in service of downplaying the links Mellen details between Clay Shaw and The Agency. “In reality, Clay Shaw had simply been one of thousands of businessmen who had once been a source for the CIA through its Domestic Contact Service … Shaw was a Kennedy supporter (and a) decorated war veteran.”

Here, flag-waving is substituted for dealing with Mellen’s great spadework on this interesting question. Ayton does not dispute that, as Mellen reported, Shaw had been cleared by the Agency for project “QKENCHAT (which) authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist ‘civilians,’ people not officially with the Agency, to discuss ‘projects, activities and possible relationships.’” [p. 133]

If Ayton is right that Shaw’s arrangement was unexceptional, and that “thousands” of other American businessmen had similarly been empowered by the CIA to “recruit or enlist ‘civilians,’” there is no record of it. Moreover, the CIA called QKENCHANT an “operational project,” not an intelligence-gathering project. And Shaw’s records were kept in The Agency’s “operational files,” not with the “innocent” Domestic Contact files that housed the routine debriefings of ‘simple’ returning American businessmen.

Ironically, Ayton ignores what even Max Holland has acknowledged: Shaw lied under oath in denying his association with the CIA. “Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?” Shaw’s own defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond asked him. “No, I have not,” replied Shaw.” [11] Against the interests of his own Agency, CIA director, Richard Helms, put the lie to that. Holland relates that Shaw had had an [at least] eight-year relationship with the CIA, sending The Agency information on 33 separate occasions that the CIA invariably graded as “of value” and “reliable.” [12]

One might have expected that, if only for political reasons, a Warren Commission loyalist bent on diverting suspicion from the CIA and focusing it instead on Garrison would have avoided citing Holland’s essay, “The Lie That Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination.” For that poorly conceived, anti-Garrison tirade was published by the CIA itself after his fellows at The Nation Magazine, where Holland works as a contributing editor, rejected the paper from their magazine. [13]

To undermine the important revelations of Thomas Edward Beckham, a House Select Committee witness Mellen features, Ayton describes him as a “semi-literate,” implying that the memory of a poor reader could be safely ignored. During a visit to New Orleans, Mellen interviewed former House Select Committee investigator, L. J. Delsa, a murder investigator with more than 30 years experience working variously as a federal, state or local official. In an interview on December 7, 2005, Delsa opined that, on the basis of his personal knowledge, he believed that Beckham was a credible witness.

Similar problems mar the rest of Ayton’s review. But at the end of the day, still standing are Mellen’s demolitions of the myths that the CIA played no part in JFK’s demise and that Oswald was a loner. And she has established quite convincingly that Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart in New Orleans was a hornet’s nest of activity undoubtedly related to The Agency in ways known only to those with access to still-sealed files.

With what we’ve already learned from declassified files, it’s no mystery why the government has remained so passionate about maintaining secrecy concerning JFK’s demise. For it is information that has been painfully extracted from once-secret files over the past 41 years that has steadily eroded the fables upon which the Warren Commission built its case. Mellen’s book has completed a demolition that Ayton’s valiant efforts can’t hope to stave off.

It’s past time he understood that. For when keepers of the flickering flame have to resort to Agency-abetted disquisitions to defend The Agency’s innocence, the gig is up and it’s time to sent up a white flag.

Gary L. Aguilar, San Francisco

[1] The proposition, “Was Garrison Duped by the KGB?” was the subject of our debate held during a conference hosted by the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, September 18, 2004 at the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel. Holland was to have defended that proposition but did not. He chose instead to argue that Jim Garrison had “lied” when he said in his book, “On the Trail of the Assassins,” that he’d not heard of the Il Paese Sera articles until after the Clay Shaw trial. While Holland established that Garrison had indeed seen the Il Paese Sera articles before trial, he was less convincing that Garrison’s inaccurate statement was really a lie rather than a mistake. As noted in the text, Garrison never used any of the material in the articles during the trial, and his book was published 21 years after he’d seen them.

[2] Steve Dorril, Permindex: The International Trade in Disinformation. Lobster: the journal of parapolitics, intelligence and State Research, #3, 1983. On-line at: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/lobster.htm [Had Ayton but google-searched the obvious words, “Il Paese Sera, CMC,” the second “hit” would have taken him directly to this article.]

[3] See: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/siss.txt

In its entirety, John McAdams’s newsgroup post read as follows:

From - Fri Oct 15 12:22:19 1999
From: 6489mcadamsj@vms.csd.mu.edu (John McAdams)
Newsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk
Approved: jmcadams@execpc.com
Subject: IL PAESE SERA and Communist disinformation
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:19:56 GMT
Message-ID: <38075e84.4563189@mcadams.posc.mu.edu>
X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.11/32.235
NNTP-Posting-Host: 134.48.30.18
Lines: 79
Path: mcadams.posc.mu.edu!134.48.30.18

From "Communist Forgeries," a Senate Internal Security
Sub-Committee hearing on 2 June 61, testimony of Richard Helms, pp.
2-4:

<Quote on>

In recent days we have seen an excellent example of how the
Communists use the false news story. In late April rumors began to
circulate in Europe, rumors charging that the Algerian-based generals
who had plotted the overthrow of President De Gaulle had enjoyed
support from NATO, the Pentagon, or CIA. Although this fable could
have been started by supporters of General Challe, it bears all the
earmarks of having been invented within the bloc.
In Western Europe this lie was first printed on the 23rd of
April by a Rome daily called Il Paese.

Senator KEATING: Is Il Paese a Communist paper?

Mr. HELMS: It is not a Communist paper, as such. We believe
it to be a crypto-Communist paper but it is not like Unita, the large
Communist daily in Rome. It purports to be an independent newspaper,
but obviously it serves Communist ends.
The story charged --

"It is not by chance that some people in Paris are accusing
the American secret service headed by Allen Dulles of having
participated in the plot of the four 'ultra' generals * * * Franco,
Salazar, Allen Dulles are the figures who hide themselves behind the
pronunciamentos of the 'ultras'; they are the pillars of an
international conspiracy that, basing itself on the Iberian
dictatorships, on the residue of the most fierce and blind
colonialism, on the intrigues of the C.I.A. * * * reacts furiously to
the advance of progress and democracy * * *."

We found it interesting that Il Paese was the starting point
for a lie that the Soviets spread around the world. This paper and
its evening edition, Paese Sera, belong to a small group of journals
published in the free world but used as outlets for disguised Soviet
propaganda. These newspapers consistently release and replay
anti-American, anti-Western, pro-Soviet bloc stories, distorted or
wholly false. Mario Malloni, director of both Il Paese and Paese
Sera, has been a member of the World Peace Council since 1958. The
World Peace Council is a bloc-directed Communist front.

On the next day Pravda published in Moscow a long article
about the generals' revolt.

Senator KEATING: May I interrupt there? Did Pravda pick it
up as purportedly from Il Paese? Did they quote the other paper, the
Italian paper, as the source of that information?

Mr. HELMS: Pravda did not cite Il Paese. But instead of
having this originate in Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it,
they planted the story first in Italy and picked it up from Italy and
this is the way it actually went out in point of time [sic].

<Quote off>

This is important context for understanding the PAESE SERA articles
that linked Clay Shaw (correctly) to CMC/Permindex, and connected
CMC/Permindex (falsely) to support for the OAS attempts against De
Gaulle, various fascist and Nazi forces, etc. The PAESE SERA stories
were quickly picked up and repeated by leftist journals in France,
Moscow, and Canada.

This by no means proves that the CMC/PERMINDEX stuff was a KGB
disinformation operation. The left-wing journalists at the paper
would have been happy to smear what they considered to be the "forces
of capitalist imperialism" without any direct orders from Moscow.
Indeed, Helms is only *inferring* that the earlier story about anti-De
Gaulle generals was a KGB operation.

But this episode does put the 1967 articles on Shaw/Permindex into
context. The articles were, in one way or another, motivated by a
communist ideological agenda.

.John

[4] * Anthony Marro. Helms Is Fined $2,000 and Given Two-Year Suspended Prison Term--U.S. Judge Rebukes Ex-C.I.A. Head for Misleading Panel. New York Times, 11/5/77, p.1.
* See also: Gary Aguilar. Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and The Nation. Probe Magazine, Sept-Oct. 2000 (vol. 7 No.6)
On-line at: http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr900-holland.html#_edn151
* See also Richard Helms’ obituary, on-line at: www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/23/national/main526654.shtml+Helms+Is+Fined+">http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:VPzZ_xFFRh4J:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/23/national/main526654.shtml+Helms+Is+Fined+%242,000+and+Given+Two-Year+Suspended+Prison+Term&hl=en&client=firefox-a

[5] In: The Assassination Chronicles--Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend by Edward J. Epstein. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 250--263.

[6] Playboy interview of Jim Garrison is on-line at: http://www.jfklancer.com/Garrison2.html, ff

[7] Harold Weisberg. Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the C.I.A. New York: Canyon Books, 1967, p. 7--14.]

[8] See the text supported by footnotes 138 to 146 in the essay, “Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and the Nation” by Gary L. Aguilar. Probe Magazine, Sept-Oct. 2000 (vol. 7 No.6)
On-line at: http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr900-holland.html#_edn151

[9] Joan Mellen. A Farewell to Justice. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005, p. 253.

[10] Carl Bernstein. The CIA and the Media. Rolling Stone Magazine, 10/20/77. Excerpts available on line at: http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/media/ciamedia.htm

[11] William E. Jackson, Jr.. The Mystery of Judy Miller's 'Security Clearance' Deepens. Editor & Publisher, 10/26/05.
On-line at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001390654

[12] Max Holland. The Lie that Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination. On-line at the CIA’s website at: http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/fall_winter_2001/article02.html

[13] On condition I not disclose his identity, a former editor at The Nation told me that Holland’s CIA-published article had been rejected by Holland’s fellow editors. I asked Holland about the rejection in person at a Washington, D.C. JFK conference on November 19 2005. “Politics,” he said, explained the rejection.