Me and Lee: How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald

(2010 Trine Day, LLC) by Judyth Vary Baker
http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/12/19/me-and-lee-harvey-oswald

Book Review
Stuart Bramhall
Dec 19th, 2011

Part I

This review is divided into two parts. Part I discusses Baker and her background. Part II delves into the personality of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Me and Lee is a memoir by the only surviving member of a top secret New Orleans research team (described by Ed Haslam in Dr Mary’s Monkey – see http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/12/15/the-hidden-manmade-history-of-the-cancer-epidemic/ ) which attempted, in 1963, to create a biologic warfare agent to assassinate Castro. It has a forward by Haslam and an afterward by longtime assassination researcher Jim Marrs. It’s also extensively footnoted and cross referenced with photos, newspaper clippings and other documents from Baker’s personal records, Warren Commission testimony, and other records from the JFK archives.

A science prodigy, Judyth Vary Baker was only 19 when she joined this project. The major strength of Lee and Me is the author’s ability to capture the naive idealism behind Baker’s determination to “conquer” cancer. As much a character study as an expose, the book portrays to perfection the blind, headstrong idealism typical of many young people manipulated into joining off-the-books intelligence-security activities.

Baker’s High School Cancer Research

It was obvious from an early age that Baker had a brilliant mind. Thanks to her extreme precociousness and heavy government emphasis on science education (to “catch up” with the Soviet space program), her high school provided her special premises to convert a science fair project into a long term study of techniques to accelerate cancer growth in mice. Thanks to Florida Senator George Smathers, she came to the attention of national cancer researchers. This led to her recruitment, after one year of college, by the prominent anti-Castro anticommunist Dr Alton Ochsner of Tulane University. Baker’s role was to assist cancer researcher Dr Mary Sherman in a project that was sold to Baker as a an effort to develop a vaccine against SV-40. The latter was a monkey virus which contaminated the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines given to children between 1955 and 1963.

Baker arrives in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 and discovers she will be conducting research in CIA pilot David Ferrie’s apartment, rather Dr Sherman’s lab. Moreover her assignment isn’t to work on a vaccine, but to help create a virus capable of causing “galloping” cancer. Her job consists of harvesting fifty or more mice every week that have been injected with SV-40 viruses mutated by exposure to radiation. She then grinds up the most aggressive tumors, suspends them in calf serum medium and centrifuges them to extract the viruses. She then transports them to Dr Sherman’s lab to be re-exposed to high intensity radiation.

Baker’s Relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald

Baker is introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald during this period because he serves as her escort, riding the bus with her to and from work. In addition to her lab research, Ochsner asks her to take a cover job at the Reily Coffee Company, where her immediate boss is a former FBI agent who is also heavily involved with the anti-Castro movement. Oswald also seems to be instrumental in persuading Baker to overcome her scruples about her biological warfare research, by revealing there is a right-wing/Mob/CIA/anti-Castro Cuban plot to kill JFK that might be derailed if they succeed in removing Castro from power. The line Oswald, Ferrie and Sherman give her that if Castro is assassinated, the different factions will start jockeying for power over Cuba and this will split the coalition.

Baker’s cover at Reily Coffee Company is that of secretary, though her main role is to ensure that Oswald, who also has a cover job at Reilly’s, gets his time card clocked in and out when he’s in the field. Both spend most of their time at their top secret jobs. Baker, who is mainly at Ferrie’s apartment dissecting mice, is never totally clear what Oswald’s assignment is. She describes him as getting regular payments from the FBI and CIA, as well as unemployment checks from a former job in Texas. He seems to be a kind of errand boy, both for the CIA and the Mafia. Oswald has relatives with the Mob and introduces Baker to New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. The Mafia has lost lucrative Cuban casinos in the revolution and is an eager participant in various conspiracies to get rid of Castro. Oswald also introduces her to Jacob “Sparky” Rubenstein (also known as Jack Ruby), who Oswald has known from childhood.

Part II

I have been reading JFK assassination literature since 1990. Of all the books I have read, Lee and Me provides the most insight into Oswald’s personality and his knowledge of the assassination conspiracy. As Baker portrays him, he comes across as an immature, bookish geek who liked to check out James Bond spy thrillers and quote from obscure literary works. He admitted to Baker that he was ashamed of hitting his wife Marina (for insulting his manhood) but seemed unable to stop. He also had strong personal views about civil rights and routinely sat in the rear colored section of buses. In 1963, the South was still militantly segregated. I can see how this might have been extremely irritating to his right wing, racist superiors.

Oswald’s CIA Role in New Orleans

According to Baker, he was very much aware that his CIA handlers didn’t trust him following his return from the Soviet Union. He told Baker that fake defectors were never fully trusted, owing to the possibility they might have became double agents. Oswald was never given the name of the CIA officer running the anti-Castro project he was working for. Oswald only knew him as Mr. B and that he was CIA station chief in Mexico. According to Oswald, this pattern of being assigned a number of minor, unrelated tasks without being clear who he was working for was typical for agents suspected of being “dangles” (double agents). Baker states he only learned his superior’s real name a few days before the assassination. In their last phone conversation, Oswald revealed the man’s name was David Atlee Phillips. In 1963 Phillips was CIA Chief of Cuban Operations. In 1954 he played a major role in the CIA coup against Arbenz in Guatemala.

Baker mentions that Oswald helped to organize a shipment of weapons smuggled into New Orleans for the anti-Castro Cubans the CIA was training as paramilitaries. She also talks about an assignment in which Oswald posed as a pro-Castro member of Fair Trade for Cuba to collect names of Castro sympathizers to turn over to the FBI. He was also identified as the agent who would smuggle the fatal viruses into Cuba. This meant that Baker had to train him to change the culture medium necessary to keep them alive.

Baker is Fired from the Project

Eventually Sherman, Ferrie and Baker succeed in isolating a tumor virus capable of producing “galloping” cancer (killing them in weeks, rather than months) in mice. They then inject it into marmoset, rhesus and African green monkeys, where it proves to be equally virulent. In August 1963, Clay Shaw (the CIA contractor district attorney Jim Garrison prosecuted in 1967 for his involvement in the JFK assassination), Oswald and Ferrie transport the virus to the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, to inject it into a “volunteer” from the Angola Penitentiary. Baker is initially told the patient already suffers from terminal cancer. She subsequently learns that he’s perfectly healthy. It also becomes clear from the blood samples she’s asked to analyze for cancer cells that numerous volunteers have been injected with the lethal virus.

Baker writes an angry memo informing Ochsner that this type of experimentation on human subjects is unethical. He immediately terminates her from the project and threatens her life if she has any further contact with Oswald. By this point the two of them have become lovers. Although Baker returns to Florida with her husband, she and Oswald make plans to leave their respective spouses and elope to Mexico after Oswald smuggles the fatal virus into Cuba.

Oswald Realizes He is Being Set Up

Oswald, meanwhile learns that his assignment is changed, that he is only to transport the virus to Mexico City and hand it off to a second courier. When his contact fails to show in Mexico City, he makes a desperate attempt to get a Cuban visa to deliver the virus himself, which is denied. He is now genuinely concerned about his own safety. The information he possesses makes him a clear liability to the people he works for unless they have a specific use for him. He becomes convinced, at this point, that they are trying to set him up to look like a pro-Castro agent in the plot against JFK.

Despite the promise he has been given to be transferred to Mexico City, his superiors order him to return to Dallas to spy on “right wing nuts” interested in killing Kennedy. He and Baker continue to maintain phone contact, using pay phones and a complex phone wheel they use to synchronize call scheduling. On October 19th, Oswald is invited to join the assassination conspiracy – planned for three alternative locations – Miami (a right-wing informant blows the whistle on the Miami plot and Kennedy forgoes a motorcade to be transported by helicopter), Chicago and Dallas. Oswald plays along, believing he can pass details of the conspiracy to trusted FBI agents who can foil the assassination attempts.

Following the records release under the 1992 JFK Act, it was learned that a tip-off regarding an assassination threat caused the secret service to cancel JFK’s November 2nd visit to Chicago. Oswald told Baker back in 1963 that he was responsible for this tip off. On November 16, he told her that he also passed information regarding the Dallas assassination plot to an FBI contact. Oswald’s wife Marina later confirmed this in a letter to the Chairman of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. According to an FBI clerk Garrison interviewed during his investigation, the FBI contact telexed the information to the Dallas FBI field office, where it mysteriously vanished.

*To protect her five children, Baker kept silent about her involvement with Oswald until her last child left home in 1998, she broke her silence. Her revelations on the Internet provoked a firestorm of controversy, both from pro-conspiracy researchers and Warren Commission diehards, who accuse her of fabricating her story from the wealth of detail on the JFK assassination circulating on the Internet.

Edward Haslam, author of Dr Mary’s Monkey (see link), has exhaustively investigated her story and defends her for the following reasons:

He has confirmed her identity and her claims about doing cancer research in high school through the microfilm file at the Bradenton Herald, while employed there managing their market research.

He has sighted the W2 slip she provides for her period of employment at the Reily Coffee Company and confirms that it’s genuine.

He has personally interviewed Anna Lewis, wife of CIA agent David Lewis, who worked with Oswald, Jack Martin and Guy Bannister in New Orleans’ anti-Castro movement. She confirms that Baker and Oswald were romantically involved in 1963.
Baker blogs, with long time assassination researcher Jim Fetzer, at:

http://judythbaker.blogspot.com/

NY Times’ Umbrella Man Exposed

Russ Baker on Nov 28, 2011
http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/11/28/ny-times%E2%80%99-umbrella-man-exposed

More and more, one is struck by the extent to which the New York Times is disassociated from reality. One might judge the paper’s publishing of official falsehoods as the occasional and accidental byproduct of the pressure to produce so many articles, were it not for the consistency and rigidly sclerotic way it loyally foists patently untrue material upon the public.

I say this as someone who still reads the Times, still has friends working there, and still retains some isolated pockets of fondness for it.

But it is hard to overlook these constant transgressions. As we note here at WhoWhatWhy, these range from ignoring the real reasons for the invasion of Libya to apologizing for fraud perpetrated by its favorite Afghanistan propagandist (and the author of Three Cups of Tea). It surely includes the paper’s failure to share with its readers overwhelming and constantly refreshed documentation of an organized coup that resulted in the death of President John F. Kennedy and the end of meaningful reform in America. I addressed that latter issue in the article, “NY Times’ Ostrich Act on JFK Assassination Getting Old.”
Far from proper journalistic curiosity, the paper sees its job as enforcing orthodoxy, and shutting down consideration of anything untoward. According to the New York Times’s peculiar brand of journalism, coups and plots happen with regularity abroad, but never, never, in the United States.

It is important to include the pejorative phrase “conspiracy theorist” in every article, even acknowledging concern about the health of democracy in America. It is important to have a good laugh at the expense of those poor souls who trouble themselves inquiring into the darker precincts of this country’s history.

So it is with the 48th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. Instead of assigning a single reporter to scrutinize the hundreds or thousands of meaningful, documented facts that do suggest more than “the lone nut did it,” the Times gets busy with the disinformation business.

Here are two Times “contributions” on this occasion:

UMBRELLA MAN

On the 48th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, the Times ran an op-ed piece and short film by documentary maker Errol Morris about another man’s research into “umbrella man.” Umbrella Man is the nickname for a fellow who famously brought an umbrella on a sunny day for the president’s visit to Dallas November 22, 1963, stood on the “grassy knoll,” and, just as the president’s car passed, he opened the umbrella and pumped it in the air. Many have speculated as to the significance, or lack of significance, of this strange behavior. Some wonder if Umbrella Man was part of the assassination scenario, perhaps signaling to shooters. There was even the September 1975 Senate intelligence committee testimony by Charles Senseney, a contract weapons designer for the CIA, that the agency had perfected an umbrella that shoots undetectable poison darts that can immobilize and kill, raising questions about whether this was in play that day. (See P. 168 in the Senate committee testimony, where Senseney explains specifically about the agency’s use of a toxin and the ability to fire it from a modified umbrella.)

The self-described Umbrella Man, Louie Steven Witt, came forward to offer his testimony in 1978, or three years after the CIA expert provided this now forgotten testimony on umbrellas as weapon. Umbrella Man came forward just as a special House Select Committee on Assassinations was focusing on the possibility of a conspiracy (which, it concluded in its final report…was likely.)

The counsel for the Assassinations Committee, remarkably, does not mention the prior Senate testimony by the CIA weapons expert that such an umbrella device did exist, and instead quotes a more shaky claim by an “assassinations critic” regarding such a device.

Mr. GENZMAN. Mr. Witt, exhibit 406 is a copyrighted diagram

drawn by assassinations critic Robert B. Cutler which shows two

umbrellas with rocket and flechette attachments. Mr. Witt, do you

know what a flechette is?

Mr. WITT. I do now. I did not prior to our interview yesterday

evening.

Mr. GENZMAN. Did the umbrella in your possession on November

22, 1963, contain a flechette, or a rocket or a dart?

Mr. WITT, No, It did not.

Mr. GENZMAN. Has exhibit 405, the umbrella, ever contained -a

flechette, rocket. or dart?

Mr. WITT. No. Not since it’s been in my possession.

Mr. GENZMAN. Did the umbrella in your possession on November

1963; contain a gun or weapon of any sort?

438

Mr. WITT. No.

Mr. GENZMAN. Has exhibit 405 ever contained a gun or weapon

of any sort?

Mr. WITT. This umbrella?

Mr. GENZMAN. Yes.

Mr. WITT. No.

Mr. GENZMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Witt.

Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions.


Is the Times at all interested in the credibility of this purported umbrella-bearer? Absolutely not.

Instead, the Morris video presents the idea that sometimes, the most ridiculous scenarios are the truth. And so it presents the ridiculous, and asks us to believe it. Cutting to the chase, the man seen opening an umbrella comes forward to explain why he did it. Reason: in 1963, he was still mad at Britain’s pre-war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler, and held JFK’s father to blame as US ambassador to England in that period. Chamberlain was famed for carrying an umbrella. So—get this—Umbrella Man, hoping to make a statement about what happened in the late 1930s to JFK in 1963, pumped his umbrella at the time the fatal shots were fired…only for this obscure purpose.

The Times passes the responsibility for this travesty to Morris, who passes it along to Josiah Thompson, a former Navy underwater demolitions expert turned Yale philosophy professor turned private investigator, who appears on-screen to ruminate about “Umbrella Man.” He is happy to accept the Chamberlain story as “delightful weirdness.”

Watching this, one gets the sense that Thompson believes there was no conspiracy in JFK’s death. But what the Times implies with this little piece is false. In fact, Josiah Thompson is known for documenting the exact opposite. He wrote a serious investigative book in 1967, “Six Seconds in Dallas,” full of evidence and specifics, in which he concluded there was a conspiracy to kill JFK—involving three different shooters. But the New York Times is not interested in that, only in this new, droll dismissal of another piece of the puzzle.

I called Thompson to ask him about the Morris video, and he pronounced himself delighted with it. I asked him how he knew that the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and present the Neville Chamberlain story was actually the same man in the fuzzy photo of many years earlier. By way of explanation, he mentioned hearing a story from a well-respected JFK researcher who in turn had heard that Umbrella Man had told his dentist years earlier that he was umbrella man. Pressing Thompson, I learned that the man who came forward as Umbrella Man never provided proof that he was in fact the man with the umbrella. Even the dentist story is third, fourth, or perhaps fifth hand, not verified by Thompson or his researcher friend. All of which proves nothing, and all of which suggests that maybe, just maybe, the man’s improbable, “delightful” story of Neville Chamberlain is, indeed, fabricated.

Just because Errol Morris is a master of the documentary art does not make him any kind of authority on what should be the province of careful investigators. Just because a story is absurd does not make it real, or “delightful”, as the Times video would like us to consider—and many did, with thousands emailing the Times piece to friends. This is something well understood by the game-players of the covert operations house of mirrors: the jesuitical contortions that can be made to twist any credible scenario.
Here are some things you should know about the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and tell this ludicrous Neville Chamberlain story:

His account of his activities that day don’t track with what Umbrella Man actually did, raising questions as to whether this man who volunteered to testify to the assassination inquiry is even the real umbrella-bearer, or someone whose purpose was to end inquiries into the matter.
The man who came forward, Louie Steven Witt, was a young man at the time of Kennedy’s death. How many young men in Dallas in 1963 even knew what Neville Chamberlain had done a quarter-century before?

In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina. Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.
A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

It’s worth considering the roles of military-connected figures on the day of the assassination. These include Dallas Military Intelligence unit chief Jack Crichton operating secretly from an underground communications bunker; Crichton’s providing a translator who twisted Marina Oswald’s statement to police in a way that implicated her husband; and members of military intelligence forcing their way into the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade, which inexplicably ground to a halt in front of the Texas School Book Depository (where Lee Harvey Oswald’s employer, a high official with the local military-connected American Legion, managed to find a “job” for Oswald at a time when his company was otherwise seasonally laying off staff.) Oh, and it’s worth contemplating JFK’s titanic, if under-reported, struggle with top Pentagon officials over how the US should interact with Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the world. You can read more about all this in my book Family of Secrets.

Is this concatenation of facts too crazy to consider? More crazy than that Neville Chamberlain story?

THE JACK AND JACKIE LOVE STORY

Not content with having Morris, who is no Kennedy expert, put out this misleading video on Umbrella Man, the Times earlier featured Morris’s book review of Stephen King’s novel imagining Lee Harvey Oswald. So now you have a man who knows little about the real story, getting people to read the imaginings of one who also knows little of the real story. Another way to look at this is that the New York Times is really, really interested in an occult novelist’s take on the death of a president, but just totally uninterested itself in looking into that death.

You must read Errol Morris’s review of King’s book, and please explain to me what he is talking about, because I have no idea. One of the few things that registered at all from this confusing mess is a comment about Jack and Jackie:

King has said that he struggled with the idea for this book for more than 30 years. One can see why. In fiction, we can decide who did or did not kill Kennedy. Writer’s choice (and King chooses). But he pays his debts to history in other ways — by showing the machine and, at the same time, the simplest human knots, the love stories behind history: Sadie and George[characters in the novel], Jack and Jackie.


Um, “the love stories behind history…Jack and Jackie”?

This is part and parcel of the Times’s approach: to maintain a feeble, People Magazine-like focus on the JFK-Jackie Camelot love story—which never actually existed. Anyone who has read any of the books featuring interviews with close friends of the couple know that the marriage was a political match for the reticent JFK, never for a minute a fairy tale romance, and that by 1963 the duo could barely stand to be in each other’s presence. If this is news to you, come out of your New York Times cave and read….practically anything else. (One worthwhile account—including Jackie explicitly ignoring JFK’s request that, for appearances’ sake, the First Lady not take off to cruise on the yacht of the caddish Aristotle Onassis in the fall of 1963—can be found in Peter Evans’s book, Nemesis. By the way, Onassis hated—and I mean hated—the Kennedys; RFK had blocked a big Onassis business deal years earlier.)

Or read in Family of Secrets how, since childhood, Jackie had been a friend of George de Mohrenschildt, the “father figure” to Lee Harvey Oswald, or how, the night after de Mohrenschildt’s testimony to the Warren Commission, Oswald’s best friend was invited to dinner at Jackie’s mother’s house, along with the Machiavellian intriguer Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired as CIA director and whom Johnson so shockingly appointed to the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s killing—a man who surely is at the top of most people’s lists of those behind the assassination.

If you appreciate these sorts of things, it is striking to learn that Onassis was a business partner in oil deals in the Caribbean prior to Castro’s revolution, with….Oswald’s best friend George de Mohrenschildt, and that Onassis’ brother-in-law was the cover employer of CIA coup plotter Al Ulmer, who just happened to be visiting the Dallas area the week of Nov 22 1963 from abroad.

So, please, can we get past this “love story” pabulum and at least do just a teensy bit of investigating these odd and flagrantly suggestive connections? Maybe they’re all odd coincidences, but at least they seem, intuitively, worth pursuing, at least as much as those “delightfully weird” Neville Chamberlain umbrella stories.

The real danger of a video like the one about the Umbrella Man is that it encourages people to stop questioning, stop investigating. Just laugh it all off. There’s no trouble here in the land of the free, the home of the brave. Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along.

It’s time to stop treating the New York Times as the slightly daffy uncle who is hard of hearing. There’s something more insidious going on, and every single person who works there and refuses to care bears some responsibility. Ditto with the rest of the media, which still takes this institution as its guide on what to cover—and what not to uncover.

Kenn Thomas Discusses JFK & UFO on Coast To Coast AM

Sunday, 11-20-11
1:00am until 4:00am.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

Steamshovel Press' Kenn Thomas talks about Fred Crisman, the Maury Island UFO and the JFK assassination (on the anniversary weekend) and whatever other parapoiltical topic that comes up...