COPA- Coalition On Political Assassinations

RFK, CHARLES DE GAULLE

AND THE FAREWELL AMERICA PLOT

A Virtual Presentation by William W. Turner

Making Sense of the Sixties .

A National Symposium on the Assassinations and Political

Legacies of MLK, RFK and JFK

The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law

Duquesne University School of Law

Pittsburgh, PA 15282 10/3-5/08

William W. Turner was an FBI agent specializing in counterespionage against the Soviet KGB 1951-61. He became the agency's first whistle blower when he sought a Congressional investigation into Director J. Edgar Hoover's softness on organized crime and career-building

toughness on a moribund Communist Party USA. In 1963 he flew to Dallas to cover the JFK assassination for Saga magazine, reporting that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Bureau informant handled by agents W. Harlin Brown and James Hosty. From 1965 to 1969 Turner was senior editor of Ramparts on such diverse topics as Cesar Chavez and his UFW, FBI illegal tapping, bugging and burglaries, CIA infiltration of the National Students Association and other dirty tricks (for which he became a target). His articles on the paramilitary right brought him to the attention of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, which in turn led him into the Farewell America plot.

Turner was a U.S. delegate to the 1995 JFK conference sponsored by the Supreme Court of Rio de Janiero in which the judges concluded the assassination was a coup d'état.

Among Turner's eight books are Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K. , The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, and best-selling Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails. His The Ten-Second Jailbreak was made into the movie Breakout starring Charles Bronson and John Huston. Books have been translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Polish editions.

As the 1968 election year loomed, America was bitterly divided, wracked by race riots and violent anti-Vietnam War protests. Early in the year President Lyndon Johnson, who had escalated the war after JFK was assassinated, resigned. The hopes of a new generation turned to Bobby Kennedy as the bearer of his brother's torch.

That spring a new book of mysterious origins hit the best-seller lists in Europe. Titled Farewell America, it exposed the powerful forces that had been arrayed against JFK and brought about his death. As a promotional blurb put it, "a revelation the political, social and economic forces which will always try to prevent men of the stamp of John and Robert Kennedy from leading or even from living."

L'Express, the foremost weekly in France, called Farewell the most violent indictment ever written by a man about his country out of love."

It had to be one of the most intrigue-ridden publishing ventures ever, more so than Che Guevara's diary or the memoirs of Stalin's daughter Svetlana. The story of Farewell America may have begun with a visit to the KGB in Mexico City; it progressed to the office of French President Charles de Gaulle in Paris. And it most certainly was aimed at advancing the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy in America. In the doing, I'affaire Farewell, which was so convoluted it seemed borrowed from a John Le Carr6 novel, somehow liberated the famous Zapruder film from the Life magazine vault in which it had been sequestered.

My involvement in this international adventure was set up when I shifted from being a student of the Warren Commission Report to a critic. The more I learned, the more obvious it became that there was more to the JFK assassination than Lee Harvey Oswald, who allegedly had occupied a sniper's perch in the Texas School Book Depository building. Remembering that Dallas police officer Welcome Eugene Barnett had told me a woman ran up to him to report a shot from the now-famous grassy knoll, I found that, despite the FBI's attempts to keep the wraps on, there were scores of spectators in Dealey Plaza who heard

at least one shot from the knoll (including, it came out years later Kennedy aides Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers).

Flaws in the official version kept piling up. Jack Ruby's mob ties and gunrunning operations belied his assertion that he had shot Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a trial. I found suspicious the fate of the Zapruder film taken by a spectator standing on the grassy knoll, which showed the entire assassination sequence. Life bought it from Abraham Zapruder and, instead of putting it to commercial use, squirreled it away. Not even Warren Commission members viewed it as a motion picture. The magazine published staggered still frames in a cover story endorsing the Warren Report when it was issued in September 1964, putting captions under each frame. The caption under frame 313, where Kennedy's head explodes, said it was from a shot from the front. But that meant Oswald couldn't have fired it. When Life realized its "error," it stopped the presses and rewrote the caption as a shot from the rear. The film also graphically demonstrated that the president and Texas Governor John Connally, sitting in the jump seat in front of him, were struck bullets within three-quarters of a second of each other, dictating two weapons. The Warren Commission disposed of this quandary by inventing the

Magic Bullet Theory, which held that one bullet zig-zagged completely through the president and the governor, smashing bones, emerging unmutilated. The theory was absurd, and over the years John and Nellie Connally, who also were in the limousine, insisted that there were two bullets.

In February 1967 1 received a call from Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney, whose probe into the JFK assassination had broken into the news a few weeks earlier. "Bill, I need your help," he said. "The paramilitary right and Cuban exiles are figuring prominently in the investigation."

I was familiar with him through the legal press, for which I wrote forensic science articles. Such was his reputation in the law enforcement field that he had been asked to write the foreward to Crime, Law and Corrections, a collection of criminology essays.

In conferring with Garrison on the boilerplate of his investigation, it occurred to me that the Russian KGB probably had a thick file on Lee Harvey Oswald, who remained an enigma as to which side he was on. He had resided in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962 as an ostensible defector, staging a bit of guerilla theater by

slashing his wrists to persuade the Russians to allow him to stay. The KGB perforce would have been intensely curious about this ex-Marine radar expert who had been stationed at Atsugi, Japan, where there was a U-2 spy plane base.

After repatriating from the U.S.S.R., Oswald found work at a Dallas photographic and graphic arts firm, where he conversed in Russian with a fellow employee, Charles Ofstein. As Ofstein testified before the Warren Commission, Oswald disclosed, "All the time I was in Minsk I never saw a vapor trail," a suggestion that he was watching for high-flying aircraft such as the U-2. Oswald also talked about the dispersion of Russian military units, saying "they didn't intermingle their armored divisions and infantry divisions and various units the way we do in the United States, and they would have all of their aircraft in one geographical location and their tanks in another geographical location, and their infantry in another..." The putative defector went out of his way at some risk to pick up intelligence on the Soviet armed forces. He told Ofstein that he journeyed from Minsk to Moscow one May Day to observe the huge parade of military units. On one occasion Oswald asked Ofstein to enlarge a photo that he explained was of "some military headquarters and that the guards stationed there ... had orders to shoot any trespassers."

Oswald displayed a more than casual interest in analyzing the Russian military.

But how to approach the Russians? As I told Garrison, "The press wolves out there would never stop howling if they caught us asking the time of day of the KGB." I thought of a plan. I would act as a cut-out, isolating the DA's office from a third man who would make the contact. The person I had in mind was an ex-CIA contract pilot who had flown bombing raids against Cuba from Guatamala. He was tall and angular, with tousled sandy hair, cobalt eyes and a magnetic personality. He had appeared on the doorstep of Stanley Scheinbaum after the Michigan State University expose appeared in Ramparts, offering to do "volunteer work" to redeem himself for his checkered stint with the Agency. Scheinbaum turned over over to me. I gave him the nom de paix Jim Rose because it was the Rose Bowl time of year. Rose was ideal candidate to approach the KGB—they would understand each other perfectly.

They did. I squeezed some travel money from a bemused Warren Hinckle, bought an airline ticket in cash so it could not be traced, and dispatched Rose to the Russian embassy in Mexico City, which was preferable to the one in

Washington, the home turf of the CIA and the FBI. I instructed him to walk straight in and ask for the third secretary, usually a KGB rezidentura. Before long he was shaking hands with an owlish man with horn-rim glasses who he would later identify from photos as Valery V. Kostikov, a KGB officer the CIA considered implicated in "wet affairs" (assassinations). Although Rose had no way of knowing it at the time, Kostikov was one of two KGB men who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald when, in September 1963, he had desperately tried to secure a quick visa to reenter Russia via Cuba. Kostikov asked Rose to turn over the camera dangling on a strap around his neck as a tourist prop; the KGB officer might have considered it something else, since the CIA laboratory had perfected camera guns that were aimed through the viewfinder. "I got it back later in better working order than when I gave it to him," Rose recounted. Rose explained the Garrison investigation to Kostikov and how there was a question of Oswald's true affiliation as well as increasing evidence of Cuban exile involvement with elements of the CIA in the assassination. Would it be possible, Rose delicately inquired, to obtain a "sanitized" version of the dossier on Oswald and whatever else might assist the investigation? "It will be necessary for you to stay in Mexico City for a few days," the Russian temporized. He asked the name of Rose's hotel, suggesting he stick close to it.

Rose was tailed from the embassy to his hotel, and remained under surveillance. He assumed it was the KGB, and that they were protecting him. That night at dinner, he observed a burly Russian-looking man sitting at a table across the room watching him without pretending to do anything else. Rose sent him a vodka neat, which prompted a smile and a salute. "They used a tail on a tail," Rose said. "It was very professional."

On the third day, one of his tails asked that he visit the embassy again. Kostikov was waiting. "What you request is not impossible," he said, choosing his words carefully. "But it is not necessary that it will happen. The only way that it could possibly occur is in a way that would be most unexpected, and untraceable to its source. Something might be left in your hands, for instance, by a visitor to your country." After this guarded answer, which Rose guessed came from Moscow, Kostikov changed the subject. "Do you like books?" he asked. He handed Rose two Soviet books, West-East Inseparable Twain and USSR Today and Tomorrow, apologizing that they were on the only ones translated into English. As a further gesture, he invited Rose and me to be guests at the forthcoming fiftieth-anniversary Red Army Ball at the embassy. Neither of us owned a tuxedo, so we didn't attend.

Eight months later, in April 1968, Jim Garrison phoned to report that he might have the Russian response (he always insisted that I go to a "neutral" phone to discuss sensitive matters). He had just received a call from New York from someone identifying himself as a representative of Frontiers Publishing Company of Geneva, Switzerland. The representative said his firm had an important work in progress on the Kennedy assassination that would soon be published in Europe, and he wondered if Garrison would be interested in taking a look. Within days the DA's mailbag brought three black-bound volumes of manuscript specklessly typed on an IBM machine. It was titled simply The Plot. Garrison dispatched a copy to me via courier.

Tomorrow, apologizing that they were on the only ones translated into English. As a further gesture, he invited Rose and me to be guests at the forthcoming fiftieth-anniversary Red Army Ball at the embassy. Neither of us owned a tuxedo, so we didn't attend.

The Plot manuscript, which would eventually be brought out as Farewell America, had a note attached saying that a fourth volume was being written. The author of record was James Hepburn, whose name was not to be found in the Writer's Directory. A brief biography stated he had attended the London School of Economics and the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, "where he prepared for the public service." It claimed that Hepburn had lived for a short time in the United States, making the acquaintance of Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy) and Senator John Kennedy. The text was sprinkled with European metaphors, such as the description of the Kennedy limousine swinging into Dealey Plaza: "Then the leaves began to fall, and soon the traces disappeared."

The immense breadth of knowledge contained in the manuscript dictated that Hepburn, whoever he was, was the beneficiary of a network of sources. Although borrowing liberally from published critics of the Warren Report, the manuscript displayed tremendous scope in the sections about the roots of the Cold War, the interlinkage between the large American corporate and banking interests and the ever-growing U.S. intelligence apparatus, and the international petroleum cartels. Brought alive by sinister portraits of CIA spymaster Allen Dulles, the cantankerous Dallas oilman H. L. Hunt, Roy Cohn and a bevy of military brass and Mafia chieftains, it advanced the theory that JFK was killed by an ad hoc amalgam of powerful interests, public and private, which had nightmares about a Kennedy dynasty that might extend through a Teddy presidency. The amalgam was called The Committee. It sponsored and carried out the assassination of JFK at both the supervisory level and the "gun" level—possibly recruiting professional assassins from the ranks of Cuban exiles embittered by Kennedy's failure to supervene with military force at the Bay of Pigs and to invade Cuba during the missile crisis. The bottom line was that JFK's enemies, collaborating with the CIA and other interested parties, moved to exorcise the Kennedy curse.

The manuscript bristled with such restricted information on the CIA that it could only have come from an inside source, and the author ventured cryptically, "In the domain of pure intelligence, the KGB is superior to the CIA." The social side of the Kennedys did not escape notice. One of the early chapters, entitled simply "King", dealt with the elegance of John and Jackie's White House. The gossips, it noted, complained that 'the Kennedys spent $2000 on the food for one of their parties, neglecting to add (or perhaps they didn't know) that the President donated his entire salary to charity." Just how close to the White House the book's creators got is revealed in a paragraph about JFK's love life: "The President was discriminating in his affairs... There were models of all nationalities, local beauty queens, society girls and, when he was really in a hurry, call girls. A Secret Service agent whose code name was 'Dentist' was in charge of the President's pleasures." The manuscript went on to lecture about sitting in judgment on such matters: "Puritanism is so widespread in this world, and hypocrisy so strong, that some readers will be shocked by these passages.... Why should a nation tolerate a President who is politically corrupt, but not one who is physiologically normal?" This was scabrous stuff for the time, when there was a gentlemen's agreement in the media not to bare the sex life of public officials. But it didn't survive Farewell America's publication, having been scissored out by some phantom censor.

Before long, Jim Garrison called to say, "You know that fourth volume? It just walked in the door." But the messenger from Frontiers Publishing didn't have the final volume with him—a representative would have to be sent to Geneva to read it. I couldn't go because I was tied up with a political campaign, so the DA sent one of his corps of volunteer investigators, Steve Jaffe, a professional photographer. Jaffe went to the given address of Frontiers in Geneva, only to find that it was the office of a large law firm, Fiduciaire Wanner, specializing in Swiss banks. Frontiers was incorporated in Liechtenstein, he was told, but its editorial suite was in Paris. In the City of Light he again found himself in Fiduciaire Wanner offices, but this time his visit produced a man who gave his name as Herv6 Lamarre, the publisher of Farewell America, n6e The Plot. Regretfully, Lamarre said, the author, James Hepburn, was not available. In fact, the Frenchman confessed over Pernods, Hepburn didn't exist as such. Lamarre had concocted the name out of flaming admiration of Audrey Hepburn. The James had come from faime—I love. A nice French touch.

Lamarre told Jaffe that the manuscript actually was written by one man, "not famous, not an aide of Kennedy, ut an established American writer." It was not until recent years that I had enough data to identify the ghost as Thomas G. Buchanan who indeed was a journeyman journalist with an elegant style. A Yale man, Buchanan was an artillery captain during WWII who went into newspapering but was blacklisted during the McCarthy era accused of belonging to the Communist Party USA. He then free-lanced for European periodicals, notably France's prestigious L'Express. When JFK was murdered Buchanan instinctively sensed a high-level conspiracy and set about to prove it through a 1964 book Who Killed Kennedy? Through a staffer of the Warren Commission, he got his book filed with that body, which led to Senator Ted Kennedy arranging an interview with Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, who was filling in for Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In turn Katzenbach passed him on to a Warren Commission functionary. But the Commission was blocked by the powerful FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who only two days after the fact ruled that Oswald was the lone-nut assassin. But when Bobby got set in the starter's blocks for the 1968 race, the Kennedys—and the French—knew exactly who to call.

As they bistro hopped, Jaffe discovered that Lamarre's background was every bit as exotic as his taste in actresses. He had been in the French army, attended Harvard, edited a women's magazine, tipped glasses socially with Jackie Kennedy, served in the French diplomatic corps in Indochina—and was connected to French intelligence. This last item was confirmed when Lamarre took Jaffe to the Elysée Palace to see Andre Ducret, the chief of the secret service, whose office adjoined that of General Charles de Gaulle, the president. Ducret told the young American how vital his mission and Garrison's investigation were, and how France appreciated their efforts. He disclosed that his secret service had indeed furnished information for certain parts of

Farewell America. Then he ducked into de Gaulle's office and returned with the general's personal calling card, on which he inscribed, "Je suis très sensible a la confiance que vows m'exprimez." (I am very moved by the confidence you have expressed in me.) The book now bore the imprimaturs of the highest councils of the French government, which was not too surprising. The haughty president of the republic had very much admired Kennedy's style, and never believed that Oswald was a "lone nut." "You're kidding me!" he scoffed to an interviewer when apprised of the Warren Commission's verdict. "Cowboys and Indians!" he concluded. De Gaulle himself had been the target of a conspiracy of military officers a year before Dallas; the conspirators, known as the Secret Army Organization and opposed to de Gaulle's pullout from Algeria, set up a cross fire ambush of his car, narrrowly escaped when his driver sharply accelerated.

When Jaffe pressed for the book's principal sources, Lamarre named, among others Ducret; Interpol, the international police clearing house; and Philippe Vosjoly, the chief French petroleum espionage agent in the United States, who assertedly infiltrated the CIA, the Texas oil industry, and anti-Castro action groups in South Florida. Vosjoly, Lamarre said, had interviewed a member of the paramilitary ambush team in Dealey Plaza a Cuban exile, in Mexico City. And there was another source; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy administration (later a senator from New York). Lamarre confided that on the day after the assassination, Robert Kennedy called in Moynihan, one of the family's most trusted aides, and instructed him to quietly assemble a small staff to explore two possibilities: that mortal enemy Jimmy Hoffa was behind it, or that the Secret Service had been bought off. In due time, Moynihan handed RFK a confidential report that there was no evidence of Hoffa's involvement or of Secret Service culpability. Through "personal friendships" with Kennedy insiders, Lamarre said, the report was delivered into the hands of French intelligence.

This pretty well accounted for a cryptic passage in a Farewell America chapter called "Secret Service" that went, "Only Daniel P. Moynihan, a former longshoreman, had some idea of such things." The chapter detailed the "glaring errors" of the president's guards, even to the number of bourbons and water they downed the night before. But it also credited the Secret Service agents with professionalism in recognizing the work of professionals on the other side. "They were the first in the President's entourage to realize that the assassination was a well-organized plot," the chapter said. "They discussed it at Parkland Hospital and later during the plane ride back to Washington. They mentioned it in their personal reports to Secret Service Chief James Rowley that night. Ten hours after the assassination, Rowley knew that there had been three gunmen, and perhaps four, at Dallas that day, and later, on the telephone, Jerry Behn (head of the White House detail) remarked to Forrest Sorrels (head of the Dallas Secret Service), 'It's a plot.' 'Of course,' was Rowley's reply. Robert Kennedy ... learned that evening from Rowley that the Secret Service believed the President had been the victim of a powerful organization."

As for Oswald, Farewell America portrayed him as a CIA contract agent who had been sent to the Soviet Union to exploit his particular knowledge of the U-2 spy plane—he had been trained for the mission, learning both the Russian language and U-2 technology at the U-2 base in Atsugi. This was solid information, Lamarre assured Jaffe, which came from a French intelligence agent in Japan, Richard Savitt, who had known the Marine during his hitch there. After "defecting" in Moscow, Oswald made his way to Minsk, which was under the path of U-2 overflights between Turkey and Finland. There, Farewell matter-of-factly declared, he "was in regular contact with the CIA through its Moscow station at the American Embassy. As a U-2 specialist, he may have used a special radio transmitter broadcasting on a 30-inch wavelength, which is undetectable on the ground but can be picked up at 70,000 feet by a U-2, which is equipped with an ultra-high-frequency recording system (5,000 words in 7 seconds)." Upon Oswald's repatriation to the United States, the book reported, the CIA would have entertained the possibility that he had been converted to a double agent by the Soviets.

Not long after Jaffe left Paris, Farewell was published in France as L'Amérique BruIé (America Burns). At the same time, Frontiers Publishing, in the person of Lamarre, was searching for an American publisher. Warren Hinckle was tempted, puckishly foreseeing a Ramparts cover story, "Who Killed Kennedy, by the KGB." But first he wanted to see that elusive fourth volume that hadn't been included in the European editions. Surely it would pack a punch, perhaps name players. While in New York, Hinckle decided to brace Patrick Moynihan about his report on Hoffa and the Secret Service. At first the amiable Irishman refused to talk, but a second call to his Cambridge home, in which the subject under review was broached, brought him rushing to Manhattan. Hinckle and Bob Scheer, who also was present, briefed him on what the French were saying. Although he denied knowing Lamarre, he did not deny his secret mission for RFK. Nor did he confirm it. Clearly on edge, he wanted to make some private phone calls. "I have to ask some people," he said. Some twenty minutes later, he emerged more composed to announce that he had nothing to say on the matter.

By this time, a one-page sequel had been added to the Farewell manuscript, which was headed "The Man of November 5th." It began, "The choice made by the people of the United States on November 5th, 1968, will have profound and far-reaching consequences for the life, liberty and happiness of the universe. The peoples of the earth are awaiting new decisions." The entire tone, mirroring the angst Europeans felt regarding Pax Americana conveyed the hope that Bobby Kennedy would be successful in his presidential run that year. But then, as if the clack of the typewriter had been interrupted by a news bulletin, the text lapsed into the past tense.

"There was another funeral. Once again the stars and stripes flew at half-mast. On an evening in June, Robert Kennedy joined his brother beneath the hill at Arlington, and those who pass by can bring them flowers. The tombs are splendid, but the scores have not been settled. Who killed them? And why?"

When Bobby Kennedy was shot, the Farewell project seemed to die with him, as if its sole purpose had been to boost his candidacy. Three months later, Hervé Lamarre called long distance, saying he had to see me. He would be in San Francisco the following day and would be staying at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. I told him I had to catch a plane to New York but could stop by for an hour on the way to the airport. Lamarre was slight and fidgety, with a wispy mustache and fingertips yellowed by countless Gitanes. The conversation went nowhere, and I wondered what the great urgency was. The Frenchman talked aimlessly, deflecting questions about the project. Jim Rose was with me and drove me to the airport.

The punch line came that night when Lamarre called Jim Rose and said, "You're both professionals. There's an important package I want you to have." It could be picked up at the St. Francis Hotel, at the bottom of Nob Hill. Rose approached the bell captain, gave a password, and was handed a sealed film can. When I returned from New York we screened what turned out to be a motion picture rendition of Farewell. As a sonorous narrator chronicled John Kennedy's political career, still photos of the president with kings and kids, pots and everyday people rolled along with shots of his grim-faced enemies: Dallas right-wing oilman H. L. Hunt; the pro-Blue General Edwin A. Walker, whom Kennedy had cashiered; the Big Steel executives forced to rescind price hikes; J. Edgar Hoover, who considered Camelot subversive; Richard Nixon; and on and on. There were also digressive interludes, such as one in which Frank Sinatra was heard singing "It's the Wrong Face" while visuals suggested secret amours. Then the music turned dirgeful as actual footage showed John and Jacqueline Kennedy boarding Air Force 1 in Fort Worth for the short hop to Dallas. There was the motorcade to downtown spliced together from the home movies of spectators lining the route. And then ... the Zapruder film.

I was not prepared for how horrifyingly graphic the film was in moving form. After his limousine slows at a sharp turn, Kennedy clutches his throat in reaction to the first shot. He slowly slumps forward. Then his head literally explodes, creating a halo of blood mist. The force of the hit knocks him backward so violently into the rear seat cushion that it is compressed. He rebounds forward as Jackie grabs for him. There is no mistaking that the kill shot was fired from a frontal zone, somewhere on the grassy knoll. The Texas School Book Depository was to the rear.

With the film can in hand, I flew to Los Angeles to try to verify that it was the genuine article. A colleague, CBS television newsman Pete Noyes, had the network's film expert thoroughly examine it. Noting that the frames were in perfect order, that the coloring was consistent, and that there were no signs of tampering or editing, the expert pronounced the film a genuine second-generation print. I offered it to CBS to show nationally, and the Los Angeles executives who watched a studio screening were excited at the prospect. But top executives in New York scotched it on grounds that Life held the property rights and would sue. ABC and NBC also declined. It was left to a small Los Angeles UHF channel to air the Zapruder film for the first time.

How the French laid hands on the film was possibly explained by Richard Lubic, a member of RFK's California campaign who was with him in the pantry the night he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Lubic told me that very early in 1968, when he was a staffer at Life's companion publication, Time, in Time-Life headquarters in New York, the film was missing from its vault for several days. When the absence was discovered, there was quite a stir. The FBI and the CIA investigated, and even Mayor John Lindsay came by to ensure that the New York police gave it their best Kojak try. Although it was patently an inside job, no suspect was ever fingered.

When an American edition of Farewell was finally printed, an afterword was a bit coy as to the method of purloining. "We were fortunate enough to obtain two copies of this film, from two different sources in the United States," it read. "One is a poor copy, the other of excellent quality." Pointing out that the stills Life had run when the Warren Report came out were retouched, the afterword stated, "The unedited version of this very moving film utterly demolishes the official version of the assassination put out by the Warren Commission. The Zapruder movie belongs to history and to men everywhere."

The American edition of Farewell was never displayed in the windows of Brentano's and Doubleday. At the Fairmont Hotel session, Lamarre had casually answered "Sure" when I asked him if there would be one. A few weeks later, a notice arrived from a freight forwarder that a consignment of books from a Montreal warehouse was ready to be picked up. The shipping bill of $282 had not been prepaid, but the money to settle it was on deposit in a Swiss bank. branch in San Francisco. To the end Lamarre was playing at foreign intrigue. Frontiers Publishing vanished as suddenly as it had sprung up, and Lamarre slipped back into the intelligence shadows.

It was left to me to settle the historical account. There were six cartons of some one hundred hardcover books each, printed in Belgium, in the shipment, and I distributed them all to researchers, college bookstores and institutions. The Los Angeles public library has five, the Australian embassy one. The Library of Congress catalog card number is 68-57391.

I also took to the hustings to show the Zapruder film to groups across the country, mostly on college campuses. While the overwhelming majority of audience members

gasped at the head snap and agreed that it was convincing evidence of a shot from the front, an occasional hand would be raised to ask about theories put forth by Warren Report supporters that Kennedy's head jumped towards Oswald's rifle due either to a neurological reaction or jet propulsion effect. When I showed the film to an SRO crowd at Texas A & M University, an ROTC cadet called my attention to an article in a medical journal by Dr. John Lattimer advancing the jet propulsion theory. By this time I had had enough of the fanciful hypothesis. "Dr. Cyril Wecht, the forensic pathologist who is coroner of Pittsburgh and has seen countless gunshot wounds, concludes the shot came from the front," I replied testily. "Dr. Lattimer's medical specialty is urology, and I am tempted to ask: isn't that a pisser?"

I also pointed out to the doubting cadet that the windshield of a motorcycle cop riding to the immediate left rear of the limousine was splattered with brain and bone debris, which substantiated that the fatal head shot was fired from the right front--the grassy knoll zone. In any case, the repeated showing of the Zapruder film placed it in the public domain, where it belonged in the first place. Life eventually returned the original to the Zapruder family, which in 1978 gave it to the National Archives for "storage."

When Congress created the JFK Assassination Records Review Board in response to heightened public awareness of a conspiracy as a result of Oliver Stone's 1991 motion picture JFK, in which the Zapruder film was shown (I lent Stone my copy), the board accomplished a legal "taking" of the original to put it "in the custody of the American people." In 1999 an arbitration panel set the value of the original at $16 million, to be paid to the family.

After Frontiers Publishing vanished without a trace, questions lingered. Did Jim Rose's August 1967 visit to the Russian embassy in Mexico City trigger the Farewell America project? Valery Kostikov said that any response would be "in a way that would be most unexpected, and untraceable," as for example "Something might be left in your hands by a visitor to your country." That is what happened, but it leaves the puzzling question, how could the Russians have set French intelligence in motion? It was an open secret that the French foreign espionage agency, SDECE, was so penetrated by the KGB that in intelligence circles it was quipped that the SDECE drank more vodka than wine. Although the KGB connection remains ambiguous, the stamp of the fleur de lis is unmistakable, as evidenced by the project's endorsement by de Gaulle and Ducret. This suggests, as Lamarre indicated, that there was witting collaboration by members of the Kennedy inner circle, because it is doubtful that de Gaulle would have proceeded without it. Although the family consistently held the public position that the Warren Report was the final answer, privately Bobby Kennedy expressed a different opinion by words and action. Charging Daniel Moynihan with forming a task force to look into whether Hoffa was implicated and the Secret Service was bribed demonstrates that he was skeptical from the start. The Moynihan report found its way to French intelligence, with some of its findings appearing in Farewell. A decade ago, Toronto bookseller Al Navis, who had just stumbled upon boxes of Farewell America collecting dust in a Montreal warehouse, queried David Powers, the Kennedy adjutant who was curator of the John F. Kennedy Museum, about the book. "I can't confirm or deny the European connection," Powers replied, but Bobby definitely didn't believe the Warren Report." RFK's press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, recently confirmed that RFK was engrossed in the Garrison case. "When the Garrison investigation started," Mankiewicz told author Gus Russo, "Bobby asked me if he had anything. I said I didn't know. He asked me to learn everything I could about it. He said to me, 'I may

need it in the future."' In May 1968 RFK's California campaign aide, Richard Lubic, tracked me down by phone in Garrison's office to advise, "after he's elected, Bobby's going to go. He's going to reopen the investigation." When I conveyed the glad tidings Garrison broke into a Cheshire cat grin. Several months before, comedian Mort Sahl, who was aiding the DA's investigation, had arranged a secret meeting between Garrison and Sahl's friend Bobby at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. Garrison briefed Bobby, who agreed that he was on the right track. "What are you going to do about it?" Garrison asked. "I'm going to wait until I'm president, then reopen the case," Bobby replied. "If it was my brother, I'd reopen it right now,"Garrison retorted. On June 3, two days before he was shot, RFK said, "I now fully realize that only the powers of the presidency will reveal the secrets of my brother's death." Ever pragmatic, he understood that only by becoming president and controlling the Justice Department could he realistically undertake a new probe.

The most likely exegesis of Farewell America is that it was a clandestine project by the "European connection," aided by access to the Kennedy group, to independently promote RFK's presidential bid, at the same time setting the stage for a fresh investigation once he was in the White

House. Probably the riddle of Farewell America will never be fully solved. But in its brief life span the project produced a vital legacy. As the book hopefully put it, "The Zapruder movie belongs to history and to men everywhere." That desire has now been realized.

WILLIAM W. TURNER

163 MARK TWAIN AVE,

SAN RAFAEL, CALIFORNIA 94903

(415) 479-7945

fanofjfk@aol.com