George Michael Evica -- he is the author of And We Are All Mortal: New Evidence and Analysis in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was published in 1978. Mr. Evica, welcome, and if you would help us focus on the records this morning, we'd appreciate it.
MR. EVICA: Thank you.
"The arc of the universe bends toward justice," from a letter to the editor by Joseph E. Lowry, President, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, New York Times, March 24, 1995.
Though this is not in the prepared notes that I gave you copies of, this is a message from Marina Oswald Porter, who urges you to subpoena all film and all video generated by both the networks and the local stations in Dallas and, obviously, also from Austin and Houston, et cetera, and in the light of that, especially since Mr. Trask was so helpful, I wanted to tell you that Trask, of course, and Groden, of course, but also Martin Shackelford would be excellent sources for finding film and video, and because I was a production editor at Hearst Metrotone News for five years, as well as their music and effects editor at the same time, I know that one of the problems you will face when you get professional tape -- two inches, inch-and-a-half, inch -- from the '60s, you very well may not have the equipment on which to run it and view it.
So, I urge you to check equipment for running and viewing professional tape, et cetera, and if such equipment is available, possibly duplicating it, actually duplicating the equipment or getting it on long-term loan.
Also, when you do get film and tape, be very careful with it, because it will be already in the process of deterioration. You might want to copy some of it.
About getting the message out, I urge you -- for example, in photography -- and this is all part of my statement -- to look into photographic clubs, photographic magazines, photographic journals, and place ads, but also get on the Internet and the World Wide Web and tell them that you're looking for document suggestions, tell them you're looking for document requests, and get on all the bulletin boards and ask for those private sources.
I've delivered over 12 major papers since 1985 at conferences in Washington, Louisville, Dallas, et cetera.
Among the major the 20 major topics, I narrowed the topics for us here to six and then possibly three others if we have time, and I'd like to go over those with you now, and the topics are the Texas Trip: Presidential Security, the Texas Trip: The Dallas Motorcade Route, the Texas School Book Depository Building, Rifles, Ballistics, and as I said, possibly three others. You will notice that, among the other topics are, in fact, a topic that was touched on by Dick Russell.
For the first, the House Select Committee on Assassinations took note of the local and Federal security errors, security lapses, and security inadequacies in Dallas on November 22, '63, and specifically around and in Dealey Plaza, resulting in a site the Committee judged to be, quoting the Committee itself, "uniquely insecure."
Since no later than '75, researchers have collected comments circulating not just among researchers but in the U.S. intelligence community on a possible Dealey Plaza assassination scenario; that is, a covert test of the President's security, including a simulated attack to be attributed to pro-Castro agents or sympathizers, that test justifying an actual security stripping as part of the simulation. With the President made vulnerable, the assassination plot succeeds.
Now, what documents would you need? Obviously, all documents touching on presidential security no later than April 1963. I would bet that probably from April 23rd you would begin to see security documents of importance.
From April of '63 through November of '63, in the files of the Dallas police, especially their special services division -- that would be Officer Revill's division -- the Secret Service, especially its presidential protective division; the CIA, especially its Office of Security, I think you should know, is the CIA inside the CIA -- and the FBI, especially what might remain of J. Edgar Hoover's files, including the document called
"An Agreement Between the FBI and the Secret Service" that would be on presidential protection.
Now, what about the route? Contrary to what most people think, the motorcade route was neither controlled by the White House nor by Vice President Johnson. Governor John Connally and his Austin and Dallas associates dictated the specifics of that Texas trip.
There's only a paragraph here. I have about 200 pages now developed that document that fact. I'm not speculating on it. It was Connally and his associates who dictated the specifics of the trip, most significantly the Dallas segment, including the motorcade route.
If the route was, in fact, determined at an early date, allowing conspirators carefully to plan the assassination, then the history of that decision-making process relative to the trip to Dallas and of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza needs to be fully documented.
Now, neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations has such documentary evidence.
In fact, the most important House Select Committee on Assassinations document is tucked away in an appendix to the 12 volumes. It's remarkable that that's where you find out the most about the motorcade from the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
You need, then, all the documents relating to the Dallas motorcade route from the Dallas police, the so-called host committee in Dallas -- there were other host committees in Fort Worth and in Austin -- the Secret Service but especially the documents of the Austin, Texas, Johnson-Connally office and the Austin Secret Service.
Less well known is my second suggestion that you get all the documents relating to the Dallas motorcade route associated with, sent to, created by, or sent by Mr. Bill Moyers, the White House's representative in Austin the latter part of November '63.
Mr. Moyers worked with the Secret Service in Austin and communicated, apparently, directly and indirectly with both the Dallas Secret Service and with the Dallas host committee on the motorcade route.
I'm going to skip the Texas School Book Depository Building, because I think that's obvious, but it's only been taken up once in the literature, and that's in Jerry Rose's Fourth Decade Journal.
About the rifles, I think you realize that there is -- finally, we'll get at the heart of the problem and the hard evidence as we look at the rifles, plural, and most people do not know about the SIFAR documents.
The SIFAR documents are the Italian armed forces intelligence service documents identifying the rifle reputedly found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and photographed so that the photographs went around the world as a 7.35 rifle in appearance, re-barrelled to 6.5.
That means every discussion on the possibility of it being a larger millimeter size is justified by its apparent appearance. I'm not speculating now. I have some of the SIFAR documents but not all of them.
It's very important for you, therefore, to get all the SIFAR documents -- that's the military -- Italian military intelligence service documents -- in their original Italian, including those documents generated by SIFAR in Italy but not shared with U.S. intelligence agencies, all SIFAR documents received by the FBI, the CIA, the Treasury Department from SIFAR directly or indirectly transmitted.
Now, FBI Special Agent Robert Frazier is still available. The last time I talked to Francis X. O'Neill, former FBI agent, he indicated that Robert Frazier would be happy to talk about ballistics and about the rifles.
So, he would be especially helpful here, since he worked with the documents, the SIFAR documents, and testified to the Warren Commission using SIFAR documents.
Now, those documents are apparently not in the Warren Commission records. So, you'd have to go to the Italian government and to the FBI.
It is very important, by the way -- it was very important at the time -- I didn't realize why, but then Defense Minister Giulio Andreotti was quite concerned about the fact that it was, in fact, a Mannlicher-Carcano, and if you're wondering if the Italian bureaucracy and the media found that of interest, they flew two people over from Panorama, which is the Italian equivalent of Time magazine, to interview me in Connecticut for three hours when I broke this story on the SIFAR documents, at Giulio Andreotti's request to the Italian military that they explore the whole story of the alleged assassination rifle.
Now, about ballistics -- and I think it's very important that you see where that ballistics story is going.
Beginning with former CIA chief Allen Dulles, a member of the Warren Commission, and continuing through a series of CIA officers, both active and retired, the FBI's so-called ballistics match of the rifle reportedly found in the depository, CE-399, the bullet reportedly found at Parkland, and the fragments reportedly recovered from the presidential limo, have been seriously questioned.
If you look at the 26 volumes and you look at the testimony of Robert Frazier before the Warren Commission, the commissioners themselves doubted the FBI's ballistics argument. Check it, please.
Dulles expressed his doubt directly to FBI Agent Robert Frazier when the FBI's rifle expert was making his ballistic presentation to the Commission.
Now, notice that, if we go for these documents, we're going for documents about the hard evidence that allegedly involves Lee Harvey Oswald through a broken chain of evidence from that ballistics match that the Warren Commission members did not buy through a rifle that cannot be linked directly to Lee Harvey Oswald to the assassination.
Very important, therefore, that you look for, as I said in my documents section on this topic, the FBI's original microscopic comparisons in photographs and slides that need to be recovered from wherever they are.
FBI Agent Robert Frazier's notes and work materials need to be recovered so that an independent analysis of the ballistics evidence as it was available to the FBI, not now, but in November of '63 can be made.
I can assure you that, when you take the original FBI spectrographic reports and the original FBI neutron activation analysis tests -- and I have those documents from the FBI, and by the way, some or all of them are missing now from the National Archives, so I may be one of the people from whom you need to get documents that no longer exist either in the FBI files or in the National Archives -- that I would urge you to have those independently checked by a spectroscopist and a neutron activation analysis person.
About the others, my other topics, I was very happy to hear Dick Russell talk about John Thomas Masen. You will get your best -- I think, for now -- your best leads on John Thomas Masen and his relationship to ALPHA-66 and Frank Ellsworth from Ellsworth's documents -- that is, the Treasury Department's records -- and from the documents that are cited in my book, And We Are All Mortal.
For the medical records at Parkland and Bethesda, no one has looked yet for the teaching institution records. Almost all of the doctors at Parkland and at Bethesda, many of them, had teaching institution connections, and some of them made reports to their teaching institutions; that is, as part of an internship, residency, et cetera.
I would make no assumptions. Find out every teaching institution that was involved with Parkland and every teaching institution that was involved with Bethesda, find out if there were any records distributed from both Parkland and Bethesda to those teaching institutions' files. I think you're going to come up with some very interesting material there.
Lastly, the Bethesda medical record -- the last time that I interviewed Francis X. O'Neill, former FBI agent, he said at approximately midnight, he left Bethesda, the morgue room, where a fully-clothed body, presumably of John F. Kennedy, was in the coffin and the work largely, both of the autopsists and the cosmeticists, had been concluded.
Yet, sometime after midnight -- I think after 1:00 -- we know that at least two Secret Service agents saw an apparently naked John F. Kennedy on his face, and they were asked to verify a bullet hole in his back.
What you have to reconcile, therefore, are two different sets of records that are at odds with what Francis X. O'Neill reports he saw as he left Bethesda and what Secret Service Agent Hill reports as he stayed at Bethesda, and that's no small concern, because that brings up that whole question of body alteration.
Thank you.
CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: Any questions for Mr. Evica?
DR. NELSON: I have a question.
How do you think we should treat the information that reveals presidential protection if, in fact, they're still using many of those same methods today.
MR. EVICA: They are still using some of those same methods, and let me take you back to 1975 and '6, when I was in close touch with George O'Toole, former problems analysis chief of the Central Intelligence Agency.
I talked about a history of security stripping from the presidency of John F. Kennedy to the two shootings in which President Ford was involved.
George O'Toole had no doubt that security was inadequate and that we were going to have war, in effect, results of either security stripping or inadequate security that would threaten the lives of the presidents.
I see that as a pattern, this inadequacy in presidential security. Some may see it as something even more. But certainly, the uniquely insecure security of the President of the United States on November 22, 1963, was the context in which John F. Kennedy was killed.
CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: That's it, Mr. Evica. We appreciate your sharing your information with us today.
MR. EVICA: Thank you. I will be sending you a much longer memo.
CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: Great. We appreciate it.