Oswald had help, ex-agent says

Rocky Mountain News ^ | 11-21 | Rocky Mountain News

[ambrose]

Rocky Mountain News

To print this page, select File then Print from your browser

URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_2445221,00.html

Oswald had help, ex-agent says

Coloradan convinced that more than one

By Ellen Miller, Special To The News
November 21, 2003

GRAND JUNCTION - Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone when he killed President John F. Kennedy, and the president died because Secret Service agents failed at their jobs, a retired agent says.

"Officially, the answer to Oswald when somebody asks - because we were ordered to say it - is that the Warren Commission found that he acted alone," retired agent Jerry O'Rourke said. "But was there more than one gunman? Yes, personally I believe so. And my personal opinion about Jack Ruby is that he was paid to kill Oswald."

O'Rourke grew up in Telluride and attended Western State and Regis colleges, then spent 22 years in the Secret Service. Now retired and back home, he spoke this week to the downtown Grand Junction Rotary Club.

O'Rourke said his group of about 10 agents had protected Kennedy the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, at a breakfast speech in Fort Worth. Then the group left by air for Austin, the next stop planned on the president's Texas tour.

"We got the word (of the assassination) in the air, and we didn't believe it at first," he said. "Most of the agents had tears in their eyes. Agents believed in Kennedy, and we knew we failed our job in Dallas."

After his White House tour ended during Johnson's presidency, O'Rourke spent a year in the Secret Service intelligence division, which offered him glimpses into the investigation of Kennedy's death.

Those glimpses, and the accounts of other agents, have convinced O'Rourke that Oswald didn't act alone.

He cited several reasons:

• Kennedy had a number of enemies, any of whom could have plotted against him. They included people angered by his insistence on civil rights; organized crime; labor unions unhappy with investigations of them by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Cuban dissidents angry over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

• The shots attributed to Oswald were impossible to make. O'Rourke learned to shoot as a boy and trained as a military marksman. He said his visits to Oswald's perch at the Texas Book Depository have convinced him that no one could have fired a rifle three times so quickly, hitting the president and Texas Gov. John Connolly.

• The trajectory of one of the shots could not have been made by a gunman on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. The shot entered Kennedy's body at his lower back and traveled up, to exit near his throat.

• The circumstances of the autopsy were irregular. Texas law requires autopsies to be done in state, but agents, acting on the orders of White House, took Kennedy's body back to Washington, D.C. The autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center under secrecy that prevails to this day.

• Evidence was destroyed. O'Rourke said that on the day of the assassination, one agent was ordered to clean out the cars used in the motorcade, getting rid of blood and other evidence. The agent told O'Rourke that he found a piece of skull, asked the White House doctor what to do with it, and was told to destroy it.

• Instructions were given to lie. The agent in charge of motorcade protection told O'Rourke that he was told by the Warren Commission during his testimony that he did not hear a fourth shot and did not see someone running across the grassy knoll. But the agent insisted that his account was accurate.

• Evidence about the shots is in conflict. An open microphone on a motorcycle in the motorcade picked up four shots, not three.

"In my opinion, Hoover wanted the commission to find that Oswald acted alone," O'Rourke said.

"The complete file won't be released until 2027, and the reason for that is most of us will be dead by then."

Copyright 2003, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

[El Gato]

This reference was previously unnoticed and there was no cause for concern until it was brought to light in the 70's during the joint select committee on assassination hearings as GHWB was rising in stature and assuming the directorate of the CIA.

George H.W.Bush was running Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Offshore (drilling), in 1963. He was also running for the Senate, or getting ready to do so. He lost that '64 race. He wasn't affiliated with the CIA until being appointed the Director in 1976 by Gerald Ford, after serving two terms in the House and again losing a Senate race (no Repbulican was likely to win a statewide race in Texas in 1964 or 1970. After that he held several appointive posts, before becoming CIA director in '76. He then was Ronald Reagans VP for the 1980 election. But one can't let easily verified facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory. This one is even lamer than his magic SR-71 flight.

[El Gato]

Speaking as a former Marine, who qualified "Expert" with the M-14 twice in a three year active enlistment, I saw nothing unusual about the shot Oswald took from the Book Depository window ... he got off three rounds in quick succession ... no big deal

With a POS Italian WW-II Surplus bolt action rifle, probably only dropped once, with a cheap POS scope. It would actually have been easier without the scope to fire those rounds that quickly, because the FOV was so narrow that reacquisition would be more difficult.

The biggest question is, why would Oswald order that POS Italian iron, when he could just as easily have gotten an M-1, which would have been a much better "tool" for the "job" he had in mind. I don't think his finances were that bad, to force that choice due to economic reasons.

BTW, I too remember where I was, and what I was doing on that day.

[BlueNgold]

Dude, read the book ... Mortal Error ... and he reached the same conclusion .. just because it CAN be done, does NOT mean Oswald accomplished it ... etc etc

[BlueNgold]

I'm not saying I believe it, I was just clarifying the obscure reference made by someone else. Besides, it's not as though being a CIA operative is a bad thing, even if true. There are a lot of good people who have had CIA affiliations.

[Lancey Howard]

(( ping ))

[texasbluebell]

All that for me? Gosh.

It's a very partial account of ways in which Stone tampered with the historical record.

Well, who says Stone is the end all and be all of this incident? Certainly not I.

You know, we could throw out most of the stuff you've posted. And just let's throw in this: I'm reading one of the Fetzer books now. Who can explain to me how it was possible for the Mayor's wife and also Sen. Yarborough to smell right around the first shot the smell of gunpowder? How did they smell that at street level, if the back shots were coming from way up on the 6th floor?

What about the SS agent Hill who jumped on the back of the JFK limo, who gestured to those following him that from the condition of the head wounds, he was sure the Pres would not survive? And later we see "autopsy photos" that show a tiny little bullet hole? Come on. The deaf mute (who observed the limo as it waited for 30 seconds under the underpass) saw JKF's entire back of the head blown away.

There are so many unanswered questions that we will never know the truth.

I no more place faith in Stone than I do in any apologist for the govt. We'll never know the truth.

The only thing I'm sure of is that there was no way on earth the LHO did this alone, and I frankly have come to the conclusion recently that he didn't even have much of a role in it at all. I'm willing to grant him one of his last comments that he was a patsy in the scheme of things. And that is a very recent conclusion of mine, after many years of thinking he did it.

What about the SS agent who said that JFK had to have been hit 4 times, and Connelly 3 times? Way more than the 2 shots Magic Bullet Specter tells us we should believe. This was a massive coverup of some sort of coup, and so much evidence has been obliterated and altered over the years that we'll never know what really happened.

The govt will never tell us the truth, and I don't even care anymore if they want to or not. They do things on a daily basis that are beyond what most of us would countenance, but most of them do it for the good of the country. Now I'm not excusing any of them who may have had a part in this fiasco in Dallas, I won't condone what seems to have been a coup d'etat, it was inexcusable, but mostly they work for the betterment of the country and they seem to believe that the populace can't handle the details.

Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, they have to answer to God themselves.

I've reached my own conclusions, I'm satisfied that enough has been revealed to me that I've come to terms with this episode in history, and I just don't give a damn what any of them say anymore.

[Lancey Howard]

Good find, good post.
If I knew nothing about the Kennedy assassination, I would still never believe in a million years that a 24-year-old ants-in-his-pants "activist" who clearly did not want to get caught, aimed and fired a bolt-action rifle at the President of the United States not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES, shooting even after he had ALREADY HIT his target.
It didn't happen.

[Lancey Howard]

Kennedy was holding his throat after the first shot. If a big bullet, shot from behind, tears through somebody's back and then exits his throat, does that person grab his throat? Or does he basically fall over dead?

As far as the next shot, well, I am still waiting for a reasonable explanation for how a shot fired from behind could make somebody's head fly BACKWARDS so violently.

[Lancey Howard]

Nor do any of those scenarios account for the inability of the rifle to be properly sighted in after it was alledgedly moved back and forth across the country stored for months where it could have been stepped on or banged around, then disassembled and reassembled.

That's a great point.
Anybody who has ever been through boot camp and spent time on the rifle range knows that the first thing you have to do is set your "dope" on your rifle. And the "dope" is different for every individual who picks up a rifle, even if it is the same rifle. That is, a rifle's dope is personal for every shooter. Oswald would have needed to practice and set his dope on that exact rifle.

[wolficatZ]

 

JFK never "clutches his throat" in the Z-film. It's typical of the misinformation

 I see repeated over and over again, and then is accepted as "fact" by those

who haven't done thorough JFK assassination research.

 

There is one way to answer a lot of the unanswered questions about the

 head wounds and the secretive autopsy:

 

Exhumation.

[aristeides]

Interesting report. I just finished reading Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK. The following paragraph appears on p. 287 of that 1968 book:

The Secret Service was guilty of negligence, as the highly-respected Wall Street Journal commented. But its agents were professionals, and they recognized the work of other professionals. They were the first in the President's entourage to realize that the assassination was a well-organized plot. They discussed it among themselves 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 remarked to Forrest Sorrels (head of the Dallas Secret Service), "It's a plot." "Of course," was Sorrel's reply. Robert Kennedy, who had already interrogated Kellerman, learned that evening from Rowley that the Secret Service believed the President had been the victim of a powerful organization.

[rubbertramp]

I read a book about Ruth Paine...what a whitewash. We are supposed to believe that Ruth Paine took in Oswald who she testified kept a rifle in the garage, which she knew about, while her toddler children were around just so she could pick up the Russian language...and she is supposed to be some practicing Quaker.

Her husband Michael disavowed any knowledge of the Oswald photos with the gun back in Warren Commission days, but for the book, he stated that he saw the photos. Here, a husband, seperated from his wife and children for some reason, allows an unknown quantity supposedly a wife batterer and lunatic to brandish weapons around his family and there is no comment to his wife recorded in history....give me a break!

It makes sense when you realize how entrenched the Paines were to the military industrial elite.

[texasbluebell]

"Kennedy was holding his throat after the first shot. If a big bullet, shot from behind, tears through somebody's back and then exits his throat, does that person grab his throat? Or does he basically fall over dead?"

No, he grabs his throat when the bullet _from the front_ hits him in the throat.

He doesn't fall over dead till the next bullet _from the front_ hits him in the right temple.

In the meantime, he's hit from the rear as well, probably twice.

I think I remember someone over the years describe this event as a turkey shoot. He didn't have a chance.

[Lancey Howard]

Good excerpt; good post.

When a sitting President gets shot up the way Kennedy did under all those wacky circumstances (the timing, the motorcade route, the open limo, etc.).... and then the assassin gets killed two days later(??).... Well, coincidences are one thing, but the Kennedy assassination was way too far over the top for even the craziest of "magic/bullet", "lone assassin" theorists to stand a chance at credibly explaining.

The professionals knew right away that there was a plot, and time, perspective, and deeper analysis have only reinforced that rather obvious conclusion.

"Turkey shoot" is a good analogy.

[texasbluebell]

That book "Farewell America" is on my list to get next. Am reading now one of the Fetzer books, "Murder in Dealey Plaza".

Definitely worth reading, he draws it all together very sensibly.

[ambrose]

I think I remember someone over the years describe this event as a turkey shoot. He didn't have a chance.

Yes you did hear that... you heard it from Oliver Stone via Kevin Costner (just watched that film the other night).

[texasbluebell]

Really? Ha. That's funny! I didn't know where it came from, but it fits.

Well, it fits if you're not one of the Oswald-did-it-alone crowd, I suppose...

[ambrose]

All available evidence (which would be admissible in a courtroom) points to Oswald doing it alone. That does not mean there wasn't a conspiracy. Was Oswald doing it on Castro's orders?

I find it interesting that Oswald was originally charged by the Dallas PD of killing Kennedy in furtherance of an international Communist conspiracy. The conspiracy reference was quickly dropped due to pressure from the White House, which was concerned about the obvious - WWIII.

[norton]

As I remember it, it was the Kennedy family that got the files sealed for thirty (?) years and there has been additional years tacked on since thene

[Jhensy]

Oswald-acted-alone believer here. If you watch the Zapruder film, right after they pass the metal street sign, it's OBVIOUS that JFK and Connelly are struck by the same bullet. They both react at precisely the same time -- JFK hands rising up to his throat, Connelly's arm flailing out to the left. Connely grimaces or groans noticeably, and slumps back into his wife on his left.

Then, nothing for about 2-3 seconds, enough for Jackie to lean in and ask her husband what's wrong, and bang, the fatal head shot.

Knowing the first (missed) shot occured before the metal sign, it sure looks to me exactly as the Warren Commision spells it out.