Thomas Samoluk on Richard Case Nagell

Samoluk: You may know the name of Richard Case Nagell, a military intelligence officer. His name had been swirling around for many years. And you may know the author Dick Russell, who wrote the 700-page book on Richard Case Nagell, The Man Who Knew Too Much. And so we had been pondering that, although to be perfectly candid, I did not think that there was anything really there, relative to Richard Case Nagell, I thought that he was a troubled individual that may have said he was in possession of records and had knowledge of things that I didn't find credible, but we thought we had to pursue it.

So, the general counsel for the review board, somehow we found, maybe one of our investigators, found an address that we could write to Richard Case Nagell, and sent the letter. And we thought, we were asking asking him if he would talk to us. And he was in Los Angeles. And a few days later, one late night, at the Review Board offices in Washington, I got a call from a researcher, who had been following what we were doing. He said, "you're not going to believe this, but a contact in law enforcement in LA, tells me the police have found Richard Case Nagell dead in his apartment."

And the person who was calling me didn't know that we had sent a letter to Richard Case Nagell. So, you can imagine my reaction -- we just had sent the letter, it had been enough time for it to arrive, and now Richard Case Nagell is dead, at his apartment in L. A. So, it turned out it was a natural death. There was really, he was not in good health. But I again, packed up one pair of underwear and a deodorant and got on a flight to L. A. And we knew that Richard Case Nagell, had a niece -- may have been the only relative that he had. Somehow they had learned of his death. And they were, the niece, and I believe it was her fiance, were going to be out in LA. And we agreed, again, trying to work with them, we said, we, you can't take anything. And we have to be there with you, namely me, again, riding solo.

And but we wanted to have some legal backup protection, in case there was not cooperation with the relatives, who I was going to meet at the apartment. And I was met at LAX by an Assistant US Attorney, with whom we had been in contact. And she had prepared a subpoena for me to use, if I, if I needed it, to serve upon the relatives, the niece and her fiance, if they were not cooperative with me, and of course, imagine them -- they're told that this federal agency dealing with assassination records is going to meet them in L. A. at the apartment. And, so they didn't know what they were in for. They later told me they thought it was gonna be, you know, three FBI agents in black suits, with, you know, nine mm. side-arms. And we're in for [unintelligible].

And there was, there was me, just me, showed up. And I was I was looking for cooperation, not confrontation. And they were cooperative. And we went together through all the records that were there. And, and some are in the archives. There wasn't much there. There wasn't much that was relevant.

If I recall correctly. If I don't get this completely accurate, forgive me, because it's been a while since I've been day-to-day in in the record, so to speak. But Nagell had always talked about a trunk, full of records and relevant materials that he had. Well, we didn't find that trunk at his apartment, which by the way, wasn't in the best neighbourhood in L. A. He was down on his luck, not doing well. And it was a real bad neighbourhood near Dodger Stadium. So, that was a personal note that I wanted to add for me that the job was sometimes a little bit, a little bit scary what we were doing.

But months later, I would guess it was, I got a call from the niece. They had found, somehow they found out that he had used a storage facility and he had some trunks there, that is Richard Case Nagell had some trunks. And they had them. So, I flew back out to California, and met them. And together, we went through the trunks. I don't recall that there was anything particularly relevant and whatever color the trunk that he had talked about, we never found a trunk of that color. So whether or not that adds to the mystery, what happened to that trunk? I don't think there was much to his story; some people might put more credence in it. As I said, Dick Russell wrote a 700-page book about him. But our point was, if there was records that were related to the assassination in any way, and rounded out the story or components, or theories that people had subscribed to, and we could access records, films, photos, then we should add them to the collection. That with Nagell was another instance where we did that.

Over the past several months, I have shown in multiple blog posts how Oliver Stone's documentary series, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed, misleads viewers. In fact, despite months of work, there are still many more misleading segments that need to be addressed. It's no wonder that the fact checkers of Netflix nixed the airing of the films.

There is a choice between four hours of tendentious nonsense (JFK: Destiny Betrayed) and two hours (JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass). As a handy guide for viewers, here are all those posts in order of their appearance in JFK: Destiny Betrayed and JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, preceded by some general critiques.

The Viewer's Guide has now been updated to include the sources from my new book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.