John Newman (file photo)
When author John Newman spoke at Lancer's 1999 November in Dallas conference, I was not aware that he would be appearing on The History Channel's program on the ARRB but a few days hence.
But I wish that I had known about it. One of Newman's concluding comments on that show was that "the idea of a high level, institutional plot within the CIA to kill John Kennedy is crazy."
I'd like to know what's crazy about it. I was immediately reminded of a story told by Robert Tanenbaum, the Deputy Chief Counsel for the HSCA, at the 1995 COPA Conference. Tanenbaum related how a TV interviewer
...said to [Richard] Helms, "People say that you're responsible for the assassination of the President of the United States." He said, "That's crazy." "Well, why's it crazy?" "Because the day of the assassination, we did a check to see what was going on with our operatives."Do you want a better confession than that? On November 22, I was walking out of a philosophy lecture ... and the word flashed: the President has been shot. No rational, decent, patriotic American was thinking about anybody in the Government of the United States of America who in any way could have conceivably been responsible for this murder --- unless he knew things that 99.9% of the population didn't know. [And] Helms says he was checking this out on the day of the assassination.
John Newman, a former Army Intelligence analyst, spoke at length to the Lancer conference. He spoke so long that his presentation was interupted so the next speaker could go on; Newman returned later that evening to complete his presentation.
The name of his speech was "Mexico City, A New Analysis." By now I have heard Newman speak a number of times, and to me, the effect is always the same. It's like someone has emptied the contents of a dump truck over me. Facts and figures, names and pseudonyms, places and dates, all pile up like so much gravel. It's hard to sort it all out, and invariably, I begin to think: What is the point of all this?
But maybe I'm missing the point. Newman's talks are typically greeted with great enthusiasm. Although I do not share the enthusiasm, and resent anyone calling a legitimate perspective "crazy" without saying why, I will try to hit Newman's major points here without bias.
"I'm John Newman," he began, "and as I said, I'm a conspiracy theorist ... I'm trying to get to be conspiracy theorist first class." This quip drew a few chuckles.
Newman used numerous documents during his talk, which were projected on an overhead. They were difficult to read and no copies were made available, so I am not going to refer to them in much detail during this summary.
"There are really two competing stories here," Newman said, referring to phone calls to and from the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City between September 28 and October 1, 1963. The calls were allegedly made by Lee Oswald and were tape recorded, although the contents of those recordings remains hotly debated.
One of the competing stories "is that the tapes survived the assassination and were listened to, in fact were listened to in Dallas, Texas by FBI agents while Oswald was alive," Newman said. "And they got a surprise when they listened to the tapes: it wasn't his voice.
"There's another story: the tapes had been destroyed before the assassination --- had been routinely erased." Here Newman projected a chart outlining conflicting data in the official documentation, some of it indicating the tapes were in fact erased, others indicating they survived.
Officially, Newman reminded listeners, Lee Oswald went to Mexico City in late September 1963 with the purpose of again defecting to the Soviet Union. While there, he sought visas to the Soviet Union and Cuba. This led to Oswald's alleged visits to, and phone calls to, the two consulates. In the call to the Soviet consulate, the caller mentions a meeting with Valery Kostikov, the head of the KGB's assassination unit. This is a critical point.
But was it the real Oswald who made the phone calls? Newman said that, based on the content of CIA transcripts of the phone calls, it was not, "because the words that were spoken by the person who identified himself as Oswald were incongruous with the experiences that we know he had down there."
But the content of the tapes is a separate issue, Newman said, and his intention in the Lancer discussion was to stay just on the tapes. "When you have a tape, and you can take that tape to the Dallas police building while he's still alive, and you can play it in one room and talk to him in the other room ... you can make some judgments. And if it's not him, we have a problem. So I'm going to stay rivetted ... on the tapes themselves."
Here Newman directed attention to a CIA document, which he said was included in "Hosty's book" --- James Hosty's Assignment Oswald --- which said, "the actual tapes were reviewed." The document also referred to similarities in speech between the tapes and the captive Oswald. "Similarity in speech?" Newman asked rhetorically. "Not something you will find from looking at transcripts."
Later Newman discussed a transcript of a phone conversation between LBJ and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the morning of November 23, 1963. The transcript read in part, "Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September? ... Here Johnson ... the first conversation he has with the FBI Director, the first chance he gets to ask a question, this is what he wants to know about. He wants to know about Mexico City, and the Soviet Embassy down there.
"And then Hoover's answer is classic. 'No. That's one angle that's very confusing.'
"How many people in this room," Newman asked, "have ever seen a document where Mr. Hoover said he was confused about something? Rare."
Hoover went on to say that "We have up here the tape, and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy using Oswald's name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice, nor to his appearance.
"In other words," Hoover went on, "it appears there was a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there."
After presenting other documents strongly indicative of voice comparison, Newman concluded: "My case rests there. There's enough evidence in the documentary record, as well as the sworn testimony, I think, to suggest it's a reasonable thing for me to say the voices were actually compared. And that therefore, that first cable from Mexico City mentioning erasure is very suspect."
So what does Newman think all this means? He said that when he wrote Oswald and the CIA, he was simply trying to document what was in Oswald's files. "So when I got to this point --- Mexico City, these transcripts, impersonations --- I was convinced he'd been impersonated, by the way, it just seemed very logical from reading the content of it --- but I tried not to go very far with that, because you start working with that, you very quickly go down a road of conspiracy." What?
"So I tried to erect a hypothesis in my mind where it could be benign. And it really didn't work. And where I've been for the last four years, as the Review Board has been releasing more and more stuff on this, is you really can't explain the impersonation outside of a plot to kill the President." It was in this context that Newman said he wrote an article for Probe magazine (Vol. 6, No. 6, September-October 1999), and is working on an expanded version for Lancer's Kennedy Assassination Chronicles.
"Right now," Newman continued, "the way I look at it, the record is too replete with references to the tapes existing and not being his voice ... the story that shows up in everybody's files up here is so overwhelming that it provokes, precipitates a lone-nut coverup immediately."
And so, he went on, "the plotters killing the President --- well, not just killing him, but neutralizing law enforcement and the intelligence agencies, because you had to do that ... if you don't, they're going to do their jobs ... unless there's some reason they shouldn't be doing their jobs, especially if it's investigating the murder of the President. So integral to the plan must have been to neutralize them, and make them not do their jobs. And the story from Mexico City does that. That's what this is all about."
What it was all about, Newman said, was linking Oswald to an alleged Cuban/Kremlin plot --- a story planted in Oswald's files, to be discovered after the assassination and immediately touching off a cover-up that supposedly prevented nuclear war.
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