JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass

I will now highlight a few... er... more than a few
... notable passages that my friendly twitter followers may enjoy

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Note: others have done amazing summaries of the great research in this book but I'm gonna do it, too. Theres a lot of great stuff in here

So the book starts with your standard Kennedy admiration plus some extended bits about how much the author loves Thomas Merton (I don't really know why) but once you get through all of it you get to the Good Stuff

Oswald's wiki entry starts like this:
"Lee Harvey Oswald was an American Marxist and former U.S. Marine who assassinated United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963"
The only true part of that sentence is that Oswald was a Marine. But even that sells him short:

As soon as L.H.O. returned to States, he was placed in the care of George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian expat enmeshed in Tx oil/intel world. He got him a job at a map service that subcontracted w/ US Army & may have helped on maps of Cuba JFK saw during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Also of note, there: the company L.H.O. worked for in New Orleans during his little foray to the Bayou also had CIA connections, and its offices were literally surrounded by spooks.

New Orleans: Oswald was arrested for staging/provoking a street fight while handing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets. Instead of calling a lawyer, or his wife, he asks for... an FBI agent, by name.

Seems strange, until you learn that Oswald was a paid FBI informant.

There are a million examples throughout the book that detail how insane the military advisors surrounding Kennedy were, & how isolated he was in defying them. To highlight one - here's a plan, Operation Northwoods, proposed to him by the CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF:

The real smoking gun re: Oswald was that he had a 201 file opened on him by the Counterintelligence Special Investigations group of the CIA - the only reason a person had this file opened on them is if they *were* a CIA asset determined to be a risk of defecting or going haywire:

Aside: the House Select Committee on Assassinations is the only good thing to come out of the legislative branch of the US government since 1976

Yes I'm being hyperbolic but my point stands

Moving on

The KGB knew about the plot to kill Kennedy through their double agent, Richard Case Nagell. Nagell may have known/worked with Oswald in Japan and was assigned by his KGB handlers to monitor him once he came back from his "defection" to the Soviet Union:

Nagell ignored KGB orders to kill Oswald, wrote a letter to FBI detailing what he knew in hopes it'd stop the plot, then fired a gun into the ceiling of a bank in El Paso, TX, so he'd be arrested and "safe" in jail.

It only delayed the assassination 2 months

He died in 1995:

I'll pick this up again, soon.

Lots of good stuff to come, including the CIA having so many Oswald body doubles the Warren Commission had to manage the confusing fallout from it, the CIA spy plane that picked up the Oswald double from Dallas once L.H.O. was arrested...

... Oswald threatening to blow up the Dallas Police Department, and the insane story of Rose Cheramie.

Until then.

Ok, here we go again.

So by the early 60s the CIA had placed operatives/loyalists at various levels of the federal bureaucracy. Dulles was an evil bastard, but he was a goddamn ruthless and competent evil bastard.

This is the part of the book that blew my mind...

The Chicago plot - Kennedy was supposed to be assassinated in Chicago, as his motorcade made it's way to an Army-Air Force football game. An informant,"Lee," called the Secret Service and tipped them off to the plot.

They had a patsy ready - Thomas Arthur Vallee, an ex-Marine (like Oswald), a loner (like Oswald) w/ connections to Cuban expats (like Oswald).

He was also drove a car whose license plate didn't come up in regular police searches - only the FBI could access its registration info

One of the Chicago cops who brought Vallee in had ties to the CIA and was part of the team that assassinated Chairman Fred Hampton.

There were two two-man teams of snipers in Chicago. One set was brought in for questioning, though their identities were kept secret and they were released. The second set was never found.

So here's an interesting theory as to why Kennedy was killed when he was - the military (represented by Joint Chiefs) believed their "first-strike nuclear advantage" would be up by the end of 1963. A president interested in detente with Khrushchev was a waste of that opportunity:

We're almost to The Event, but first...Rose Cheramie.

She became known to Louisiana Police when she stated, on Wednesday 11/20, that she and the men she was with were going to kill Kennedy in Dallas.

She was a heroin addict in throes of withdrawal so she was ignored, at first:

After JFK was shot, the Louisiana cops called her in for further questioning and investigated her story. They asked her to describe the men she was with. They attempted to pass all of it off to the Dallas cops - but by this time, L.H.O. was already killed by Ruby. Nice and tidy.

Cheramie stated she was a stripper at one of Jack Ruby's nightclubs who:
- knew Ruby well
- knew Oswald
- knew the two of them knew one another

and no one in Dallas, nor the FBI, wanted to question her. She was turned loose. She wound up dead on a Texas highway 2 years later.

In 1967, Jim Garrison's investigation led to Cheramie, and to the Silver Slipper, the club where she had been the night of 11/20/63. The owner of the Lounge ID'd the two men she was with as Sergio Arcacha Smith and Emilio Santana, Cuban exiles affiliated with the CIA.

Ah hell. Need another break. I hope this isn't too terribly annoying. I think it's fun to share. Also my apologies if the shots of the pages are shit but, hey, you get what you pay for.

Back to it.

This book is a bit of a frustrating read, in that the narrative bits about different people/events are broken up and scattered around. The author weaves them all in and out of place, instead of just having the Khrushchev section, the Oswald section, etc.

So it actually isn't a great source for the nuts and bolts of what happened in Dallas that day - if you want that, I can recommend further/other reading to you.

The one thing I will share - the nail in Oswald's coffin was the phone call he made Saturday night to a number in Nags Head, NC, where a Naval Intelligence center was located. He was trying to reach his case officer for help:

Anyway it feels a bit weird to skip over the shooting but I'm gonna highlight other random tidbits that blew my mind.

For instance, L.H.O. seemed to be trying to meet a contact at the Texas Theater on 11/22. He kept standing up, moving around, sitting next to different people.

When the cops showed up to arrest him, it was as if they were attempting to provoke a gunfight / execution, but it didn't work out that way and they took Oswald alive.

Some of the police reports filed by Dallas cops allege Oswald was arrested on the main floor of the theater and taken out the front; some of the reports say he was arrested in the balcony and taken out the back. Both are supported by eyewitness accounts. So what gives?

And with that, I bring you to the wonderful, weird, and extremely frustrating tale of Oswald's Body Double. Or Body Doubles? Were there three? Who the hell knows!

The CIA was so determined to put blame on the Soviet Union and Cuba for the assassination that they had impersonators in Dallas and Mexico City doing little errands to lay down an investigative trail that could be used later on.

Problem was, they had Oswald (or a double) causing a scene at a Texas gun range the same damn day he was supposed to be at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City causing a scene trying to meet with a KGB hitman.

Also... two weeks before the assassination, either Oswald or his double dropped off a letter to an FBI office threatening to blow the place up:

So whatever happened with the Oswald double? He was spotted by an auto mechanic a few miles from Dealey Plaza later in the afternoon on 11/22/63. The mechanic thought the man was behaving strangely and wrote down the plate of his car.

The plate was registered to a Carl Amos Mather of Garland, TX and you'll never fucking guess who Mr. Mather was connected to: both the CIA and... J.D. Tippit, the Dallas cop supposedly killed by Oswald after the murder of Kennedy:

One of the first calls Tippit's wife made upon learning of her husband's murder was to Mr. and Mrs. Mather, who went over to her house that evening to console her... all the while, a car with Mather's plate had been implicated in the whole plot. Wtf.

It's hinted at in the book but never really explored in depth - could Tippit have been killed because he saw his friend with the Oswald impersonator, thus making him a witness to something he shouldn't have been? Wrong place, wrong time?

It would have mucked up the whole operation. But put yourself in Tippit's shoes, he's driving along, minding his business, when he runs into his friend and another guy. Then one of them shoots him in the damn chest.

Almost done... one more story.

A CIA plane picked up the Oswald double. There was an unexpected traveler along for the ride - a Robert Vinson, of NORAD, who unexpectedly boarded a plane in D.C. to catch a ride home to Denver after a meeting at the Pentagon on 11/22.

Vinson thought he was going to Lowry AFB outside Denver, but his plane suddenly veered south, landed in Dallas, and picked up a "Latino-looking man" and a short, slender fellow who was a dead ringer for L.H.O. from a makeshift runway just outside the city.

They flew to Roswell, NM. Vinson had to catch a bus home to Colorado. He told his wife about the strange trip, and after Oswald was killed the following day, the two of them decided they would be in danger if they spoke up, and never spoke a word about it until 1993.

Here's how Vinson was handled in the interim:

I think I'll end there. That's like, the one guy in this story that didn't meet a violent end. So, there. A happy ending!!!

TL;DR - the CIA ran point on the JFK assassination, Oswald was a patsy, the Warren Commission was a coverup operation, and there ought to be a movie about Rose Cheramie.

Good night and thanks for following along.

Family of Secrets thread: https://twitter.com/BTH_Bill/status/1253532148893659141?s=19