Russian state media is supporting RFK Jr.: Russian state propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik have been heavily promoting US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publishing dozens of articles about him and using his speeches to amplify pro-Kremlin, anti-US talking points. The timing of the propaganda push lines up with the lead-up to and announcement of Kennedy’s presidential candidacy, which raises some big red flags about potential election interference on the part of Russia. On Sputnik News, a state-run outlet which was established by the Russian-government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya in 2014, a search for “Robert F Kennedy” yields 176 articles. Almost all of the coverage of Kennedy has been in the past two months. Prior to April 2023, Sputnik had only tagged four articles about Kennedy. The spike in coverage coincides with the kickoff of Kennedy’s presidential candidacy; the paperwork for his candidacy was filed on April 5. Americans who read my blog might not know the extent of interference by the Chinese government United Front Work Department in Canadian affairs. China has tried to elect various candidates in the last two Canadian elections, and has also interfered in nomination races. I imagine that Russia will try to interfere in American politics in this cycle. Here is the conclusion to the article above: Most alarmingly, on numerous occasions, Kennedy and his anti-vaccine organization have pushed falsehoods and conspiracy theories that have aligned with Russian propaganda narratives, suggesting at the very least that there is a significant degree of ideological overlap between Kennedy and the Kremlin. He has also shown that he is willing to lend his voice to Russian state media, and to promote anti-American Russian talking points to the US population. This would be bad enough if Kennedy were just another public figure, but as a presidential candidate, the alignment between Kennedy’s public statements and Kremlin propaganda represents a potential national security threat, particularly if the Kremlin decides to promote Kennedy as a way of interfering in the US electoral process — and based on the data presented in this article, it appears that they may have already made plans to do just that. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on RFK Jr.: RFK Jr. Misquotes JFK He can't even quote his uncle properly. RFK Jr. on the JFK Assassination and Jim Garrison He gets the Garrison story all wrong. RFK Jr.'s JFK Assassination Guru Promotes Crackpot Theories RFK Jr.'s favorite JFK assassination book is full of crackpot theories. RFK Jr. Continues with JFK Assassination Nuttiness! Just when you thought he couldn't get any nuttier.

My post on Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Jack Ruby received a response from Jefferson Morley: We know that Dr. West examined Jack Ruby in April of 1964 after the completion of his trial. However, there is also an allegation that West petitioned the court to examine Ruby before his trial. Conspiracy theorist Max Good tweeted: Here is what Tom O'Neill wrote in his book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties: Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald's murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of "experts in behavior problems" to weigh in on Ruby's mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who'd impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn't revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his papers said he's been "asked" by someone, although he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown "a few days after the assassination," a fact never before made public. So, what exactly happened? Did Dr. Louis Jolyon West petition Judge Brown to allow him to examine Jack Ruby? Here is an article from the Daily Oklahoman from November 30, 1963: Quotes from the above article: A panel of nationally-known psychiatrists will serve -- if asked -- as "friends of the court" in the Dallas trial of Jack Ruby, slayer of the man who killed President Kennedy. The move was disclosed in Oklahoma City Friday night by Dr. L. J. West, of the University of Oklahoma medical school. Dr. West, head of the OU psychiatry department, said such a course had been suggested by a group of Dallas medical and legal experts who hope to avoid a circus atmosphere in the Ruby trial. ... At least 10 nationally-known experts in legal psychiatry have indicated to Dr. West they are willing to serve as "amici curiae," or friends of the court. ... Heading the Dallas group is Charles W. Webster, professor of criminal law at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Dr. West said he had been contacted by Professor Webster to sound out possibility of arranging such a panel. The president of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Jack R. Ewalt, told Dr. West he would appoint a panel of three impartial experts in legal psychiatry if the Texas court requests the panel. Here is another such article from the Corpus Christi Times of November 30, 1963: West said to the Daily Oklahoman reporter that he was contacted by Webster. This article says that Webster was contacted by West about the panel.. Hard to know who exactly contacted who. But Webster was to be the spokesperson for the APA, who would submit a list of ten psychiatrists to Judge Brown. He would then pick three to examine Ruby. If Webster approached Judge Brown, he was apparently turned down. So, Dr. West did not petition the court and it was not clear if he was even on the list of ten psychiatrists being compiled for the court. There is nothing nefarious about this at all. I did answer Jefferson Morley's tweet: I don't know if he still thinks something funny was going on. Previous Relevant Blog Post Did the CIA use a MK-Ultra Psychiatrist to Interfere with Jack Ruby's Case? There is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Louis Jolyon West interfered with Jack Ruby's case.

Esquire Magazine ran a profile of Mark Lane in its February 1979 issue. THE CASE AGAINST MARK LANE The conclusion: He has only two motives—profit and headlines By STEVEN BRILL It is pounding rain on 101 going north of San Francisco, and Mark Lane’s Hertz Toyota is not taking it well. The wind, the splash, the tin grind of the motor, nearly drown out his voice—a voice that is at the beginning of our 120-mile, three-and-a-half-hour drive surprisingly subdued. We are on our way from the San Francisco airport to Santa Rosa, 60 miles north, where Lane, he says, needs to interview a potential witness in the Guyana suicide case. As we go, I keep an eye out for a rent-a-car billboard. Should he explode when I start asking questions, I’ll need a way back. I expect a raving conspiracy addict, a foamer at the mouth. What I get the first 30 miles or so is a monotone paranoid, a voice and face bored with this umpteenth run through the story of how the CIA, State Department, Justice Department, Federal Communications Commission, even the Post Office, conspired to murder the People’s Temple residents of Jonestown, Guyana, by driving them and leader Jim Jones to mass suicide. (The Post Office did its part by failing to send Social Security checks to retired cultists.) Lane is medium large, not the peppery little tough conspiracy exposer I anticipated. And with a wide, wide nose, semifluffy black-gray beard and saggy eyes dominating his face, he looks even teddy bearish—like a whimsical cousin or uncle who teaches English lit somewhere. His pedal foot matches his mood. In the beginning, as he softly lays out the plot, we are going 35–45 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone. When we get to Santa Rosa I will find that the witness doesn’t exist: Lane will stop at a gas station, make a phone call, then say he’s made a mistake and we might as well turn back. As for the Guyana case, well, Lane doesn’t have one of those either. What he has is a twenty-six-year-old friend named Terri Buford who now lives with him at his Memphis house. She was in charge of financial records in Jonestown until just before the suicide, when she defected. Lane has her, and he also has a public relations problem—because since September he’s been a lawyer for Jim Jones, a lawyer who said in October that Jonestown was “an incredible experiment with such vast potential for the human spirit and the soul of this country.” But with Buford at his side, Lane has turned his PR problem into a new profit maker. The best defense being a good offense, he has developed his new conspiracy theory, which Buford dutifully parrots: The CIA, Justice Department, and the rest plotted to kill off the Jonestown colony because they feared that Jim Jones’s supposed plan to migrate to the Soviet Union would embarrass the United States. “Yes,” Lane acknowledges about 20 miles into our ride. “I plan to devote much of my time to helping Terri and to getting to the bottom of how Jones was manipulated by U.S. intelligence agencies and how the confrontation with Jones [and Congressman Leo Ryan] was arranged by them.” In the months following Guyana, we will be hearing from him again. Not in his early Toyota monotone. But with the practiced hysteria that I’ll see later in our ride—the kind that’s wowed them on campuses before, when the subject was death and the dead were John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. And always the adjective lawyer will come in front of his name. Lawyer Mark Lane today charged that . . . Lawyer Mark Lane revealed . . . Lawyer Mark Lane attacked. . . . Don’t believe him. On major issues, Mark Lane is as utterly truthless as any who has ever moved across our headlines. And his motives are always the same: profit and headlines. He will tell us how he became Jim Jones’s lawyer because he wanted to help Jones avoid harassment from the CIA—harassment Lane now says he feared would drive Jones mad. And of course he’ll tell us that his mission for Jones was pro bono. He told me, for example, that his total fee from the People’s Temple was set at $300 a month. MONEY FROM PEOPLE’S TEMPLE In fact, according to documents provided to me by a San Francisco survivor at the People’s Temple, Lane’s original September retainer arrangement with Jones called for an up front $10,000 payment and a fee of $6,000 a month plus telephone and travel expenses. Among the documents I obtained is a photocopy of a $10,000 cashier’s check sent to Lane by the People’s Temple. In a tie-in clause that sets new frontiers for lawyer compensation, Lane also suggested in a memo to Jones that the entirety of a three-story building Lane owns across from the Supreme Court, in Washington, should be rented by the temple. Lane says that in return for the $6,000 his sole legal service would be to file a Freedom of Information Act request “that would prove that the CIA had conspired to get Jones and the temple.” No Freedom of Information Act request was ever filed. All it takes is a simple form letter. “Mark was also going to do public relations work for the temple,” says Lane assistant and girl friend April Ferguson, explaining the stiff fees. “He promised Jones,” adds one People’s Temple insider, “that the attempt [by San Francisco lawyer and Jonestown defector Timothy Stoen] to get custody of a child Jones had kept in Guyana was part of the CIA plot to harass him and that he [Lane] would expose it all. And Jones was so crazy that he bought it.” Indeed, Lane’s memo to Jones outlining his proposed work did promise public relations work. What kind of PR work was done? In October, Lane contacted Kathy Hunter, a former reporter for the Ukiah Daily Journal (circulation 9,000) in northern California who’d written one of the earliest stories about the goings-on and the problems of defectors at Jones’s utopia in Guyana. Lane told her he’d like to meet with her and some of her sources. Except that he didn’t say he was lawyer Mark Lane representing Jim Jones. According to Hunter and two others who attended the subsequent meeting, Lane instead said he was Mark Lande, a reporter for Esquire magazine. Eight people on the West Coast involved with Jones say Lane passed himself off as Lande of Esquire during that time. When “Lande” met with Hunter and her sources, he tape-recorded their accounts of rapes, guns, violence, and other horrors at Guyana (as well as threats against Hunter), egging them on all the while with a promise of a sympathetic piece in Esquire. The next day, lawyer Lane held a press conference in San Francisco and said he’d investigated Hunter’s allegations and that she and other Jonestown detractors were crazy. This masquerade may be grounds for Lane’s disbarment that the Grievance Committee of the Second Judicial Department in New York City (Lane’s only bar affiliation) could pursue. Disciplinary Rule 7-102 A-5 of The Lawyers Code of Professional Responsibility says that “in his representation of a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of law or fact.” Lane’s “Mark Lande” act was just that. My question to Lane about Hunter’s charge that he posed as a reporter comes just after we turn around in Santa Rosa, having found no “witness.” The voice thunders, the foot pedal pushes the Toyota to 60. One hand jabs the air, the other swerves the wheel half a lane. “That’s crazy. She’s a ----in’ liar. . . . Somebody’s setting this up. Look at what the Justice Department is doing. They’re setting up my murder.” “But two other people told me the same story, on the record.” “Well, I did tell them I was a reporter. But not for Esquire. I’d never work for Esquire. It’s not a serious magazine.” Esquire or no Esquire, Lane was admitting a violation of Rule 7-102 A-5. He also admitted that Kathy Hunter asked him directly, “Who are you conducting your investigation for?” and he said, “For a magazine . . . if I’d told her I was a lawyer for the temple she would never have talked.” Worse, one of the guests interviewed at Lane’s masquerade meeting with Hunter is Steven Katsaris. Katsaris was suing the People’s Temple because he claimed his daughter was being held hostage. Now, as we splash along at 65, Lane concedes, “Sure, I took the opportunity to ask him how he might settle the case.” In short, a lawyer on the opposing side in litigation posed as a reporter to learn his opponent’s settlement terms. This apparently was not a spur-of-the-moment subterfuge. Notes of a meeting Lane had with Jones on September 17, 1978, made available to Esquire, report that Lane’s “cover,” as he described it, for interviewing a private investigator hired by a family who thought their daughter was being held hostage in Jonestown would “be production of a book, with need for facts in order to get errors & omissions insurance policy.” There was one other "public relations” effort. Former People’s Temple San Francisco official Jean Brown says that Lane convinced her on November 8, 1978, at a meeting at the Los Angeles airport, to get $10,000 in cash from the People’s Temple treasury and deliver it to Lane at the airport the next day. Lane said that with the cash, he’d get a draft of a negative article the National Enquirer was preparing on Jonestown and that he’d then be able to postpone or “kill” the article. Brown told me she delivered the $10,000 the next day but that Lane took only $7,500 of it, saying that was all he’d needed to get the advance copy. According to Brown, Lane also said that while getting the article in advance might help the temple prepare for it or even postpone it, for $100,000 in cash he could get the article killed forever. Brown has signed a sworn affidavit recounting the airport cash-delivery story. Everyone at the Enquirer denies Lane used money to buy an advance copy. Lane now concedes that he took $7,500 from Brown but that it was for more unspecified legal work, not to kill the Enquirer piece. The Enquirer article might have once been worth killing, just as Hunter and the defectors might have once been worth denouncing. But Lane and Buford are now conceding that they knew in advance that Jones was so crazy that a horror such as the mass suicide was virtually inevitable. This and the fact that Lane had heard the allegations from Hunter’s sources put him in jeopardy of a second possible ground for disbarment—that he didn’t tell authorities, American or Guyanese, what he knew of a client’s intention to violate the law. Lane, however, says that he did warn Congressman Ryan and that he went with Ryan to “smooth things over” and "prevent mass killing.” If that’s true, I ask as we splash along 101, then why did he denounce Hunter and say Jonestown was an “incredible experiment . . . for the human spirit”? The car jumps ahead from 50 to 60. His right hand leaves the wheel. “I went there and saved the lives of a lot of ----ing people while you and your ----ing editors were sitting on your butts attacking me. I risked my life for people. I made it possible for five people to get out.” REAPING THE PROFITS The last part of Lane’s new Jonestown scenario is that before he died, Jones dispatched a hit squad to kill off public officials. While the press is busy speculating about who is on the Jonestown hit list and when they’ll be hit, Lane may make even more money than he would have netted from his retainer/building-rental agreement with Jones. Three weeks before we met, Lane told me he’s not planning to make any money on Guyana lectures. Now, he tells me during our ride that he’s got a $2,500 gig in Salt Lake City tonight. And I find that his agent, George Greenfield, is telling college groups and other potential audiences that Lane will appear for $2,750. Lane tells me in the car he doesn’t plan to write a book. Six publishers I’ve checked with reported solicitations from Lane agents. One agent, Lisa Collier, told me recently that she’s asking for “at least a $150,000 advance for Mark’s Guyana book. . . . I thought it would be just $100,000, but we’ve raised it in light of subsequent events, including the revelation [Lane’s] of the hit squads.” If you’re tempted to believe that there’s a reasonable answer for such discrepancies, or that the CIA plotted to kill off the Jonestown colony by driving Jones mad, consider Lane’s past performances: November 1961: Lane, then a freshman New York assemblyman, broke into the headlines and stayed there for four months by accusing the assembly speaker of a conflict of interest. On February 20, 1962, the assembly ethics committee cleared the speaker of all conflict and said that Lane “gave wide publicity to a most serious charge against a public official without a shred of credible evidence to sustain it.” When the entire assembly, Democrats and Republicans, voted 143–1 to exonerate the Republican, Lane cast the lone dissenting vote. Next he announced a run for Congress. He then dropped the campaign, explaining that he was quitting elective politics to do something about “the steady drift toward nuclear annihilation.” December 1963: Preventing nuclear annihilation hadn’t made headlines. The Kennedy assassination did. Less than a month after the assassination, Lane volunteered a 10,000-word brief to the newly formed Warren Commission in which he argued in Lee Oswald’s defense. By January, he corralled Oswald’s mother as a client, and by the fall, he was giving lectures (for as much as $2,000 a night) and selling record albums of his Warren Commission testimony for $5.95. August 1966: Lane published Rush to Judgment—his attack on the Warren Commission. Although reviewers called it one-sided, it made an impressive case. But according to people who worked for Lane at the time, the book was mostly written and researched by volunteers of the Lane-organized nonprofit Citizens Commission of Inquiry. Hardback sales reached 225,000 in the United States, and overall the best estimate is that Lane personally cleared $300,000 from the book. Contrary to his earlier claims, Lane now concedes that he made “over $100,000” and that none of that money was turned over to the Citizens Commission. He declines to make the commission’s books available to substantiate earlier assertions that his lecture fees were turned over to the commission. “Your questions about my money are strangely similar to a CIA directive that I know was issued telling reporters that the way to handle Mark Lane is to talk about money,” he explains. I look harder for a rental car sign. February 1967: Lane promised that New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison knows “who fired the shots that killed President Kennedy,” and that Garrison’s case against businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the Kennedy case had been presented “to me detail by detail, incident by incident,” and that it was an ironclad case that would shake “the very foundations of this country.” When the case came to trial, Garrison presented no significant evidence, and the jury took less than an hour to acquit Shaw. “Garrison was right about the CIA, wasn’t he?” He pounds the hard vinyl dashboard. “You know he was right.” July 1968: Lane published another book, A Citizen’s Dissent, in which he accused the press of a conspiracy to suppress Rush to Judgment. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Victor Navasky, author of Kennedy Justice and now editor of The Nation, randomly selected six of Lane’s claims of a media attempt to suppress him and found five to be “misrepresentations.” “What do you expect from someone like Navasky?” Lane shouts. According to Lane, the book netted at least another $50,000. October 1968: Lane published a quickie paperback on a new American tragedy—the Vietnam War and the protests against it at the 1968 Democratic Convention, in Chicago. The book was called Chicago Eyewitness, and Lane wrote that “I relate what I saw which is quite different from what newspaper readers have been told took place.” Fifteen months later, in testimony at the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, Lane conceded under sharp cross-examination that statements in the book were drawn from newspaper accounts rather than personal observations. December 1970: Lane, still on his Vietnam kick, published Conversations with Americans on the heels of the My Lai massacre and other disclosures. It purported to be a series of no-holds-barred interviews with real American soldiers who committed real atrocities, such as killing Vietnamese women by putting hand flares in their vaginas. In a review, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, who spent three years in Vietnam, called the book “a lesson in what happens when a society shuns the examination of a pressing, emotional issue and leaves the answers to a Mark Lane.” Sheehan, who took the trouble to check, found that many of the soldiers Lane interviewed simply were not stationed where they said they were when the supposed atrocities took place and that other basic facts didn’t check out. Interviewee Chuck Onan, for example, was described as being part of an elite Marine long-range patrol unit that received special torture-technique training in addition to parachute, frogman, and jungle-survival courses. Sheehan checked Marine records and found that Onan had only been to basic boot camp and an aviation school before working as a stock-room clerk at a Marine base in South Carolina—from which he deserted in 1968. Sheehan was “interested in covering up for the Army in Vietnam,” Lane hollered. Sheehan is the Times reporter who was responsible for publication of The Pentagon Papers. The reviews of Conversations were so bad that the book sold only 10,000 hardbacks and less than 100,000 paperbacks, but Lane still netted “more than $50,000” in advances from the publisher, he says. July-August 1976: Lane had been largely unheard of for several years, except for some Kennedy-assassination press releases and a brief set of headlines garnered for getting arrested in 1974 as a lawyer at the Wounded Knee Indian rights trial. (The books of a defense committee he formed to receive contributions for that cause are also not available.) Then he got himself into the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination case. Five months earlier, reporter Les Payne, of Newsday, had written two articles suggesting that the investigation leading to the arrest of James Earl Ray as King’s lone assassin was less than thorough and that the FBI and Memphis police might have been involved in the murder. So Lane went to Memphis and reinterviewed people Payne had interviewed. According to Payne, Lane “lied and told my sources he was working with me.” Lane then wrote a series of articles in a short-lived publication called Washington Newsworks and lobbied with the Congressional Black Caucus, calling for a reinvestigation of King’s murder because of the possibility of FBI and Memphis police involvement and an FBI cover-up. Nearly every fact he used (and distorted) was drawn from Payne’s work, yet he characterized it all as his own new revelation. “He’s always ripping off other people’s work,” Payne told me recently, echoing the reaction I got most often from assassination buffs around the country. “The worst part,” Payne added, “is that he distorted my work so much that he thoroughly discredited it. . . . He jumped from my information about the FBI [not investigating thoroughly and hating King] to the fact that the FBI killed King. He had no bridge to get to that conclusion. But if you know Lane, you know he needs no bridge.” I save questions about Payne until near the end of the ride. Lane ignites, pounding the dashboard. “You ask him for the names of those sources. . . . He’s a despicable liar. . . . I credited him. . . . He thinks he has a proprietary right to the news.” On the strength of these new press clips, Lane then corralled James Earl Ray. (In the law business this is called ambulance chasing.) “He stole my client,” says James Lesar, who had represented Ray since 1970. “Somehow he went to visit Ray in jail and got in and convinced him [Ray] that if he let Lane file a Freedom of Information Act request about the FBI and King, he [Lane] could exonerate him. The next thing I know, he’s Ray’s lawyer.” “Lesar’s a ----in’ liar,” Lane thunders. “A total incompetent. Why don’t you talk to Bertrand Russell or Arnold Toynbee about me. Come on, write that down, goddamn it. Write down Bertrand Russell.” (Russell died in 1975, Toynbee in 1970.) As with the Jonestown Freedom of Information Act requests, Lane never filed Ray’s request. But Lane’s Ray efforts did produce a quickie hard-cover book, Code Name “Zorro,” about the King murder. It yielded Lane an advance of “six figures,” agent Collier says. “I got $50,000,” Lane says. It was also during this time that New Times magazine ran a story alleging that Ray’s brother Jerry was involved in the King murder. Lane himself admits that he quickly called Jerry Ray and offered his services to sue New Times. (That’s two ambulances chased for one assassination.) August 1978: Lane convinced Ray to testify before the House Assassination Committee (with Lane at his side as lights flashed and cameras clicked)—a course lawyer Lesar had advised against. Lane and James Earl Ray were demolished at the House hearings. Particularly damaging was a statement by a retired Scotland Yard officer who guarded Ray after his arrest. He told committee investigators that Ray clearly indicated he’d shot King and that he “just hated black people.” Lane shot back, accusing the committee of “the most irresponsible conduct in the history of Congress” for not revealing that the officer had been “dismissed in disgrace” for theft and perjury. Scotland Yard replied that the officer had been retired honorably. Undaunted, Lane made new headlines the following month, on October 14, declaring with an air of certainty that would have made Jim Garrison proud that “we now know with irrevocable evidence, evidence which is beyond any question . . . who killed Martin Luther King. . . . We know James Earl Ray is not guilty. We know who was involved. . . . We are prepared to prove this, prepared to prove [that] people in powerful positions of the U.S. government today learned of this information before we did. . . .” KOOL AID CONSPIRACY Jim Jones has so far saved Lane from having to produce on that one; the Guyana mass suicide/murder about a month after these promises on the King case gave Lane a new subject. According to Jones’s other lawyer, Charles Garry, “Lane stole my client. Without ever consulting me, the son of a bitch contacted Jones and told him he’d file a Freedom of Information Act suit that could expose a CIA conspiracy.” “He’s just a sick old man,” Lane says of Garry. “I could say he’s CIA, but I think in his case, it’s just old age and ego.” Spiced with tales about a hit squad surviving the Guyana disaster, the CIA plot is the new Lane line that we’re now destined to sit through. The sole evidence that there is a hit squad, incidentally, other than Lane’s and client Terri Buford’s statements, are the packets of Kool-Aid Lane says he found on his doorstep in Memphis a few days after the Guyana deaths. (The doorstep dropping of the drink mix used for the Jonestown poison is his death warning from the hit men, Lane says.) At least among law-enforcement people, Lane’s credibility is now such that the Memphis detectives investigating the Kool-Aid caper suspect Lane planted it himself. That’s the question I save for last, when he’s to let me off. “Get me the name of that Memphis cop,” he screams. “I’m telling you, it’s just part of the plot to discredit me and get me murdered.” “Who’s trying to murder you?” “The CIA, through the media, principally the same media that covered up the Kennedy and King assassinations. The key media are CBS and The New York Times.” “Is Walter Cronkite a CIA agent?” “I don’t know what he is, but I know what he’s done and what he’s doing. . . . By reporting I was in Geneva [taking money out of a People’s Temple bank], I could have been killed.” “Why would the government want you killed?” “I don’t know. Why was King killed?” As with the Vietnam atrocities and the assassinations, Guyana needs to be investigated. And the investigators should be watched skeptically. But Lane has repeatedly damaged the credibility of sincere critics of these past investigations by his loud, venal, truthless presence at their side. He should not be listened to as he scavenges his way through this new national nightmare, lecture and literary agents in tow. Money Quote: On major issues, Mark Lane is as utterly truthless as any who has ever moved across our headlines. And his motives are always the same: profit and headlines. Previous Relevant Blog Posts The Mark of Zorro An Anthony Lewis column on Mark Lane from 1978. Mark Lane's Scholarship! Howard Roffman finds that Mark Lane's scholarship is lacking. Mark Lane, Conspiracy Addict A profile of Mark Lane in Newsweek. Mark Lane offers to introduce Jim Garrison to "Mr. Candy" For $25,000 Mark Lane offers to introduce Jim Garrison to a witness that would tie Jack Ruby with Clay Shaw. Redactions, Redactions, Redactions... This post has a good case study of how Mark Lane exploited a redaction in a document.

My post yesterday about Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Jack Ruby was the 700th post since I started my blog in September 2020. Here are some of the more important posts over the past year: The Truth about Eladio del Valle Conspiracy theorists have alleged that del Valle was anything from the paymaster of David Ferrie to being involved in the assassination to actually being one of the gunmen. Here is the truth about Eladio del Valle from someone in a position to know. The Fake Oswald Handbill The handbills that Oswald handed out in the streets of New Orleans were stamped with either his home address or his post office box. He only used the 544 Camp Street on a few Corliss Lamont pamphlets -- and they were stamped with F.P.C.C. rather than Oswald. And yet, the Oliver Stone film JFK, and the so-called Oliver Stone documentary series, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, used a fake handbill. Here are four posts which examine the fake handbills. "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Misleads Viewers on Oswald's "Hands Off Cuba!" Handbills An analysis of the handbill used in Oliver Stone's so-called documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed. "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Misleads Viewers on Oswald's "Hands Off Cuba!" Handbills, Part Two An examination of where the fake handbill came from. "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Misleads Viewers on Oswald's "Hands Off Cuba!" Handbills, Part Three A look at James DiEugenio's use of the fake handbill. "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Misleads Viewers on Oswald's "Hands Off Cuba!" Handbills, Part Four Jefferson Morley is the latest researcher to use a fake Oswald handbill. Did Lee Harvey Oswald Have a 'Crypto' Clearance? Conspiracy author Harold Weisberg alleged that Oswald had a crypto clearance. Was there any truth to this? Jefferson Morley is wrong about "Who Shot John?" An examination of the origins and meaning of the phrase, 'who shot John?' Dr. Henry Lee, Star of "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Does Dr. Henry Lee deserve his reputation as one of the top criminalists in the United States? Dr. Joseph Dolce: Another Problematic Witness from "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Dr. Dolce's opinions were not accepted by his colleagues and for good reason. Redactions, Redactions, Redactions... A look at the redactions in some of the current releases of documents and how Mark Lane has misused this issue in the past. Grovelling at the feet of Le Grand Complotiste A column I wrote on Oliver Stone's visit to Quebec City. Bombshell: "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Proven Wrong on Chain of Custody of CE 399 There is nothing amiss in the chain of custody of CE 399. And of course, the fun part of writing a blog are the insults, and yes, I am on the CIA payroll. And don't miss the updated Viewer's Guide to Oliver Stone's so-called documentary series, JFK: Destiny Betrayed Over the next year, you can expect more posts on the Garrison investigation, important documents from the Meagher Archive, a new look at what happened in Clinton, Louisiana in the summer of 1963, and more documents from the National Archives. Stay Tuned! And my three books debunking the JFK assassination are all just $2.99 on Kindle!

Anthony Lewis of the New York Times writes about Mark Lane: Money quote: A country that goes on listening to the likes of Mark Lane is longing for witch doctors. Previous Relevant Blog Posts Mark Lane's Scholarship! Howard Roffman finds that Mark Lane's scholarship is lacking. Mark Lane, Conspiracy Addict A profile of Mark Lane in Newsweek. Mark Lane offers to introduce Jim Garrison to "Mr. Candy" For $25,000 Mark Lane offers to introduce Jim Garrison to a witness that would tie Jack Ruby with Clay Shaw. Redactions, Redactions, Redactions... This post has a good case study of how Mark Lane exploited a redaction in a document.

Sylvia Meagher wrote a letter to Clay Shaw with a terrific point: Clay Shaw was in San Francisco at the St. Francis Hotel on the 22nd and the 23rd of November. He then went to Portland, Oregon. And Jim Garrison knew exactly where he was: In March 1967, Garrison met in Las Vegas with Jim Dondson, the man that Shaw spent a large part of the November 22nd weekend with. Did he not ask if Shaw made any phone calls to New Orleans? For more on Dondson and Clay Shaw, click here. And Garrison did taken an interest in tracing long distance phone calls: Perhaps Garrison did not want to know the real answer. Just as he didn't want to know the real answer to the Cadillac that was supposedly seen in Clinton. Previous Relevant Blog Posts Sylvia Meagher's Letter to Look Magazine Sylvia Meagher's terrific letter to Look Magazine in response to their article "The Persecution of Clay Shaw." Sylvia Meagher Congratulates Clay Shaw On His Acquittal She was very pleased with his acquittal. Sylvia Meagher and Jim Garrison, Part One Meagher writes Clay Shaw a letter and his response is just terrific.

Here is an excerpt of a January 10, 1994 letter that researcher Hal Verb wrote to Harold Weisberg: You can read Hal Verb's article on Raymond Broshears for the Berkeley Barb here. He did not then describe Broshears as "unreliable." Summers' article, probably finished before his phone call with Verb, discussed Broshears: Of course, there was no relationship between Eladio del Valle and David Ferrie. Broshears was almost certainly not David Ferrie's roommate, as indicated by Hal Verb above, and by Stephen Roy as well. Broshears also clamed that he slept with Lee Harvey Oswald; that Kerry Thornley was gay; and that Thornley's body was used in the backyard photographs. Oh, and at a seance Broshears claimed that he channeled Lee Harvey Oswald. At some point, Summers realized that Broshears was a fabulist and his books do not mention him. For the life of me, I cannot explain why other conspiracy theorists, like James DiEugenio, accept Broshears' tendentious allegations. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Raymond Broshears Raymond Broshears Testifies Before the HSCA A link to a tape of his testimony and a transcript. Exclusive: Raymond Broshears on the Stan Bohrman Show, July 1968 An audio recording of Broshears on the Bohrman Show. First Garrison Interview with Reverend Raymond Broshears Bill Turner sent a memo to Stephen Burton saying that he should find and interview Raymond Broshears. Here is Burton's memo. David Ferrie's Roommate Reveals the Assassination Plot! Broshears revealed the plot to the LA Free Press Reverend Raymond Broshears Tells All to Stephen Jaffe and Mark Lane! Lane and Jaffe pay the good Reverend a visit. Reverend Raymond Broshears Reveals the Shaw-Ferrie Link! Broshears even identified the three tramps. Reverend Raymond Broshears Tells Even More in New Orleans! Of course, they had to fly Broshears to New Orleans to tell more stories. Reverend Raymond Broshears Makes a Startling Revelation! Broshears outs a Garrison suspect. The good Reverend writes about Jim Garrison Broshears' newsletter discusses his trip to New Orleans Reverend Raymond Broshears Talks to the HSCA Hard to believe but the HSCA actually interviewed Broshears. What do JFK conspiracy books say about Raymond Broshears? For some reason, conspiracy theorists believe Broshears is credible. Who was Leon Oswald? James DiEugenio believes that Raymond Broshears corroborates the existence of a Leon Oswald.

JFK researcher David Lifton died this week. This is very sad news as David was one of the good guys. Over the past couple of years, we exchanged several emails and had one long phone call. I bought a copy of Lifton's Best Evidence when it first came out in 1981. I was living in Toronto and had given up study of the JFK assassination. It was rare for me to buy first-run hardcovers, but I couldn't resist buying David's book. I didn't believe his thesis right from the start. But I found his history of the JFK assassination buffs and his interactions with Wesley Liebeler to be incredibly fascinating. These were stories I had not known, and his book was valuable for his documentation of that time period. David's character really shined in relation to Jim Garrison. He met him in Los Angeles, and it didn't take him long to figure out that he was a charlatan. Lifton was a friend of Kerry Thornley's, and he realized that Garrison was out to get him. There are links below to some of David's important writings on the Thornley affair. In November 2021, I sent David a copy of my book, On the Trail of Delusion -- Jim Garrison: The Great Accuser. Here is an excerpt of an email he then sent me: Hi Fred, I received your book — On the Trail of Delusion —yesterday. And I spent good hour (at least) reading it. Of course, its packed with information. One problem however: it lacks an index; even a simple name index would have been helpful (!). ** ** ** ** As you probably know, I spent hours alone with Garrison, back around 1968; because (around 1965) I had met Kerry Thornley —LHO’s friend from his USMC days. In 1965/early 1966, I had dinner with Thornley and his wife (Kara, I think) at their home in West L.A. Garrison entered the public scene with his announcement that he had “solved” the assassination. Because of faulty reasoning and just plain incorrect research, Weisberg, Salandria et al (who were close with Garrison) concluded that Kerry Thornley was a sinister figure (e.g., a "second Oswald” etc.). Pure nonsense. Thornley was foul-mouthed, but he was not a conspirator. He had nothing to do with any plot to murder JFK. Bottom line: as a consequence of one —possibly two —personal meetings with Garrison (circa 1967 or 1968), I had first hand experience with what an incompetent buffoon he was. (I’m assuming that you are aware of my two articles in the L.A. underground newspaper, OPEN CITY (circa 1968) about Oswald and Thornley; one of which, as I recall was titled “Is Jim Garrison out of his mind?”) The place where we (you and I) “diverge,” Fred, is that you apparently believe —i.e., you still believe —in the official version of the JFK assassination (per the Warren Report). That is unfortunate but, of course, you are entitled to your views. Anyway, despite our entirely different views on this point, I still gave your book a careful reading. Remember what Garrison told me (which is quoted on the London Forum by one of the really good researchers): “After the fact there is no truth; only what the jury decides.” IMHO: that’s a good summary of JG’s “modus operandi” —the key to how he thinks. Its the mentality of very simple minded thinking, and of a demagogue. In March of this year, I called David to discuss his interviews with Paul O'Connor and the claim in Oliver Stone's JFK Revisited that General Curtis LeMay was at JFK's autopsy. David was one of the first people to talk to O'Connor and I wanted to find out what he said before he became a star in the JFK conspiracy world. He had no firm recollection of O'Connor saying LeMay was there, but he wasn't sure. Right after our call, he posted on the Education Forum that O'Connor did not tell him LeMay was at the autopsy. We talked for a while. David only had a cell phone and there was only one place in his apartment where he could get a good signal. After about a half an hour, we were disconnected. He sent me an immediate email saying to call back. We spoke for another half hour. A large part of our conversation was on his book, Best Evidence, and the various iterations that were published over the years. I got the sense that he was lonely and was happy to talk to someone. He certainly relished telling me his old war stories. David was also disappointed that Oliver Stone never used his book for a movie. He did say that he sued Oliver Stone in 1992 because he had used stuff from Best Evidence in JFK. He eventually settled with Stone - got his name in the film credits, and received five thousand dollars. David also gave me permission to post this letter he wrote to Oliver Stone in January 1991. Here is a letter that David wrote Mark Lane in May 1968 about Kerry Thornley. Lifton wrote another letter to Lane when he received no reply: Lifton also wrote a memo about this: I will miss David Lifton. I do hope that his collection is donated to a university, or some other institution, so that others can have access to his research. Here is the Mourner's Kaddish: Relevant David Lifton Links Here is a link to essays by David Lifton on Jim Garrison from the May 31 and June 6, 1968, editions of Open City. You can also download a facsimile copy of both articles on my Documents page. Here is a memo that David Lifton wrote to other researchers about Kerry Thornley and Jim Garrison. Here is a companion piece written by Kerry Thornley.

Sylvia Meagher was a supporter of Kerry Thornley - the Marine buddy of Lee Harvey Oswald - and she even donated money for his defense. Thornley had lived in New Orleans for most of September 1963 and overlapped with Oswald for about three weeks. Garrison had a scheme to involve Thornley in implicating another Marine - it all fell apart - and Garrison then charged Thornley with perjury for denying he met Oswald in New Orleans that September. I have a chapter on Thornley in my book, On The Trail of Delusion - Jim Garrison: The Great Accuser, and it's quite the story. I am posting one of Thornley's letters to Meagher and her reply because it gives a good overview of their thinking about Garrison and his case, and it provides some details, and some color, that you won't find elsewhere. Here is Sylvia Meagher's reply. You can read David Lifton's account of the Kerry Thornley story here. And a companion article by Kerry Thornley.

Conspiracy theorist Vincent Salandria once accused Josiah Thompson of being a CIA agent: Raymond Marcus wrote a scathing letter to Thompson in January 1968 about his book Six Seconds in Dallas, and also said this: Here is a Meagher note about where the suspicion came from: She writes: Tink 8 pm Tues 3/5/68 Vince [Salandria] called, invited Tink breakfast, he went, 2 hrs. talk, the "thing" that reactivated CIA suspicion is G. [Garrison[ said, talked to "a witness" who said she talked to Tink who warned her she would be killed if she talked to G. Here is a Thompson letter to Meagher about being a CIA agent: Here is his last paragraph: Although Salandria thinks I'm an agent, one of his claque of supporters called me up to check a reference. I told him I could not comment on the President's assassination without first getting permission (in writing) from the Agency. I hope he'll understand that when you're in govt. service, you can't be too careful what you say. I am proud to part of the same intelligence network as Josiah Thompson. I regularly get accused of being a CIA agent: The CIA Wants You to Read My Book! Or here. And, if not me, then my friend James Kirchick: "Guilt by Orientation" - The CIA Strikes Again!

This is a very strange case, and I still don't have all the answers. In the summer of 1967, assassination witness Jim Hicks came to see Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Richard Sprague wrote that he had driven to "give Jim Garrison some information about the assassination." Researcher Jones Harris happened to be there, and he recognized Hicks from a picture taken in Dealey Plaza. Here is Phil Willis Slide #7: The man on the right is supposedly Jim Hicks. You can also see the picture in Volume XXI of the Warren Commission volumes: Here is another view of Hicks: While Hicks was in Garrison's office, Garrison noticed something peculiar about the picture. It looked like there was some sort of antenna-device in Hicks' back pocket. Most probably, it was an imperfection in the picture. But this was enough to get them thinking about something much more conspiratorial. Here is what Richard E. Sprague wrote about Jim Hicks in the May 1970 issue of COMPUTERS and AUTOMATION: There was additional information in the July issue of COMPUTERS and AUTOMATION: It's hard to know exactly what happened in Jim Garrison's office. Here is what Harold Weisberg wrote in Chapter 3 of his unpublished work on the JFK assassination industry: "In the middle of all of this supposedly dealing with “Additional Shots” Groden has another of his many boxes headed “Mysterious Death Projects.” This one says that Jim Hicks told Jim Garrison that “he was the radio coordinator for the assassination” (page 40). Hicks had gotten himself beaten up in New Orleans. After some time and after release from a mental hospital he was, Groden says, murdered in Oklahoma. I happened to be there for Hicks being awarded the title of assassination coordinator. It came about when Garrison spotted an imperfection on a Dealey Plaza news picture showing Hicks from the back and with the imperfection appearing to be a stiff and crooked wire hanging from his left hip pocket. Garrison realized immediately that that flaw in printing the picture was the aerial for a radio transmitter that the assassins were anxious to have seen so they could be caught, thus that imagined wire was not inside Hicks’ shirt or pants leg. Neither Garrison nor Groden nor any of the others who made a big thing of poor Jim Hicks ever explained the need for any “radio coordinator for the assassination,” assassins not having to be told to skedaddle and the sound of a bullet being fired being enough of a signal. Nor was it necessary to file any report boasting of success. But here it is, more than twenty-five years later, in this definitive book on the assassination and its cover-up. It says, anyway. There is nothing at all “mysterious” in Groden’s cribbing nor is there anything mysterious in his cribbing without discrimination, taking the irrational with the factual that he usually corrupts from his subject-matter ignorance. If Hicks was murdered as Groden says, with his customary lack of any source at all, he still had no connection with the assassination and thus there is no relevance. I was there and I know. I asked Garrison what need there was for any assassination “communications” and by radio at that, radio being the most public form of communication. First he said as a signal to the shooters. When I asked him why they needed any signal when to shoot when they saw their target, but if they did by any chance require directions why the sound of the first shot was not enough. He had no answer. But he did have Hicks come to New Orleans, where he was almost killed, without being used as a witness in the trial to develop Garrison’s imagined conspiracy case." Garrison's office spoke to Jim Hicks in mid-July 1967. He then visited Jim Garrison a few days later. Whatever happened inside of Garrison's office is unclear, but here are the two memos that were written regarding Jim Hicks: Now we have a Clay Bertrand in Dallas. But when he was shown a picture of Clay Shaw, Hicks said it could have been him, but he needs black hair and a beard. But then he was shown a picture of leftist James Dombrowski and Hicks identifies him as Bertrand. It appears to me that Hicks was trying to please. There is nothing in these memos about Hicks admitting he was the communications man in the assassination. In January 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Hicks to appear before the grand jury. His statement said that Hicks "was there when President Kennedy was murdered," and that "Hicks might have special knowledge concerning the details of the assassination with respect to its planning and execution as well as personnel employed in the assassination of the president." Sure sounds like Garrison was describing the communications man. New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 5, 1968 An Oklahoma City newspaper detailed Hicks' record of arrests: Oklahoma City Times, January 5, 1968 While Jim Hicks was in New Orleans to testify before the grand jury, he claimed he was beaten up in his hotel room: New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 12, 1968 Jim Hicks testified on January 11, 1968, to the grand jury. Hicks noticed two people in a car in the parking lot by the Texas School Book Depository: Hicks offered more information about the two men with the car: As for the sign: There is no record of such a sign being taken down. Hicks was asked about the two men: Hicks described the location of the two men and was asked if it was near the manhole cover. Before he could answer, Garrison interjected to discuss the sewer system: Garrison was a believer in a shot being fired from the sewer. Hicks was asked about getting beaten up the night before: The whole affair was traumatic for Mr. Hicks: No mention of being a communications man, and no questions about Clay Bertrand. Ten days later, Jim Garrison held his conference in New Orleans with his investigators and some conspiracy buffs. The topic of Jim Hicks came up: G = Jim Garrison T = Bill Turner, writer for Ramparts and part-time investigator for Jim Garrison F = Bernard Fensterwald Bx = Bill Boxley, one of Garrison's investigators. Now, Garrison says that Hicks was a communication man in Dealey Plaza. But he was "hopeless" as a witness. "He bartered his way out so to speak by creating a mythical assassination -- he described the gun and everything." Garrison also mentioned that Hicks was in a mental institution. This was in January, and so Hicks clearly had issues before his testimony, or right after. In June, Hicks was committed: The FBI wrote this memo on Hicks: Tom Bethell wrote about Jim Hicks in his diary entry of September 14, 1967: "Earlier on, (about a month ago,) a guy called Jim Hicks had come to see Garrison in his office one Saturday afternoon. He said he had been in Dealey Plaza when JFK was shot, although I recall he had 2 versions as to which side of the street he was on. This evening Garrison told us that Hicks has a drunken driving rap hanging over his head. He now wants us to write to the D.A. in Oklahoma to get him off. This is obviously the explanation of Hicks' visit." I was surprised to see this article about Hicks being subpoenaed to appear at the Clay Shaw trial. The Daily Oklahoman, January 16, 1969 Hicks was never called to testify. And his name was not on the list of witnesses in the memo that Tom Bethell gave to the Shaw's attorneys. Perhaps Hicks was making this all up. Of course, conspiracy theorists buy into the nonsense. Here is a page from J. Gary Shaw and Larry Harris's book Cover-Up published in 1976. And guess who else couldn't resist the Jim Hicks story. None other than our favorite conspiracy theorist, Fletcher Prouty. Here is an excerpt from his article "The Guns of Dallas," which appeared in the October 1975 issue of Gallery magazine. Few people talk about Jim Hicks. He's fallen out of favor with the conspiracy theorists. I wonder why. Even Doonesbury noticed Jim Hicks (this is from the Harold Weisberg archive): Jim Hicks was murdered in July 1988: Tulsa World, April 11, 1989 There is a major obituary in the July 2, 1988 edition of Tulsa World:

I wrote about Eladio del Valle in April of 2021. He was a former Cuban Congressman who was murdered in Miami in February 1967. Was he friends with David Ferrie? Was he David Ferrie's paymaster? Was he an assassin on the grassy knoll? Conspiracy theorists love to tell stories about del Valle - but what is the truth? My post showed that the only information linking del Valle to the JFK assassination was from a tendentious story in the National Enquirer. And since that story, del Valle has become somewhat of a cipher --perhaps an assassin, perhaps linked with David Ferrie, perhaps a chief suspect of Jim Garrison. After I wrote my post, I came across a letter from JFK researcher Hal Verb to fellow buff Harold Weisberg: Bill Barry was a reporter for The Miami News, and I realized that since del Valle was murdered in Miami, he might know something about it. He actually covered stories related to the JFK assassination: Miami News, February 18, 1967 Barry also covered the Cuban community: Miami News, August 21, 1967 However, I could not find this supposed letter in the Harold Weisberg Archives. However, when I visited the archive in 2019, I noted that the papers of Hal Verb are housed there, and perhaps the Bill Barry letter might be in those files. Last week, I noticed that the papers of Sylvia Meagher are now online at the Harold Weisberg Archive. Perhaps that Bill Barry letter was uploaded as well, and bingo, I found it: As I expected the National Enquirer story was a fraud. It was a ridiculous story on its face, as it clearly was chock full of stuff that was patently untrue. I believe this is the final word on Eladio del Valle. By the way, Barry's letter refers to Nancy Perrin Rich's story of Cuban gunrunning and Jack Ruby. Her story is not credible. Here is an excerpt from my book, On the Trail of Delusion -- Jim Garrison: The Great Accuser: (pages 229 - 230) Nancy Perrin Rich was interviewed by the FBI in late 1963, and she testified before the Warren Commission in June 1964. She told quite the story. Her marriage to Robert Perrin, who had a history of mental illness, dissolved in 1960, at which point he left. She got wind in 1961 that he was living in Dallas, and she called the police department and just happened to reach officer J. D. Tippit (the policeman Oswald later killed on the afternoon of the assassination). Upon her arrival in Dallas, she went straight to the police station and talked to him. Nancy Rich reconciled with her husband, who put her to work as a prostitute, and she claimed to have worked for Ruby in the summer of 1963 as a bartender and part-time waitress. After she left his employ, she attended four meetings where she and her husband were offered $10,000 to smuggle rifles to Cuba and bring out refugees. She asked for $25,000, but the deal fell through. Claiming that Jack Ruby had arrived at one of the meetings with a bulge in his pocket, she said he was later called into another room, and the bulge was gone when he emerged. The obvious implication was that he was a financier of the project. Her story was implausible on its face. During her testimony, she couldn’t remember who had taken them to these meetings, who else had attended, or even the location of the apartment. She could barely remember when she had lived in Dallas and New Orleans. And J. D. Tippit never worked behind a desk. There were also significant discrepancies between her FBI statements and her testimony before the Warren Commission. After speaking to the FBI, Rich was given a lie detector test. The test was inconclusive because she had taken methedrine, but the examiner was still of the opinion that “she has a tendency to delusions of grandeur.” The attorney who had represented her on a 1961 vagrancy charge described her “as being a habitual liar, who found it very difficult to tell the truth.” Her stories were “so ridiculous that no one could possibly believe them.” A Dallas police detective called her a “psychopathic liar who got great delight out of telling wild tales.” Previous Blog Posts on Eladio del Valle Was Eladio del Valle one of the assassins? An examination of the allegations that Eladio del Valle was one of the assassins. Was Eladio del Valle David Ferrie's Paymaster? An examination of rumors about Eladio del Valle emanating from the Garrison investigation.