JFK Assassination Forum

"Justice Admits Error in Shaw-Bertrand Tie"/George Lardner

"The Department of Justice acknowledged yesterday that it goofed in ever suggesting that Clay Shaw was the mysterious "Clay Bertrand" sought after the assassination of President Kennedy.

Attorney General Ramsey Clark too responsibility for the snafu in a statement issued by a Department spokesman. Clark, the spokesman said, felt that justice would best be served by the embarrassing admission.




https://ia801206.us.archive.org/35/items/nsia-ClarkRamseyStatementsOnShaw/nsia-ClarkRamseyStatementsOnShaw/Clark%20Ramsey%20On%20Shaw%2008.pdf

see all the ducks go in a row. 

Meagher was smart and literate but she revealed, to her credit, her mindset, her motivated reasoning if you will, when she said that when she heard that JFK was shot her first reaction was, "They are going to blame a communist for this." Her first thought. It was not, "Is he dead? Did they catch the people?" but "they are going to blame a communist."

This was something that affected all of her analysis of the assassination. She really did see Oswald as an American Alfred Dreyfus but instead of anti-semitism being the cause for the frame up she saw anti-communism as the reason for "Oswald-as-patsy". It was the anti- anti-communism view of the Left that saw opposition to the Soviet Union and communism as a greater danger - McCarthy and the Red Scare - than Moscow. As Fred pointed out, she was very critical of Garrison, again to her credit, but when he later said that Oswald was innocent she came to if not defend him at least no longer wanting to exile him from the assassination community. And if I have it right, she never really did give an explanation as to what happened, who did kill JFK. She was focused on exonerating Oswald and not saying what happened (which frankly, is a cop-out).

In order to defend Oswald in both the murder of JFK and Tippit (which she also did) you really have to have a deep conspiratorial worldview. She was closer to thinking of Garrison then she realized. I think Tom Bethell said when he met her at her house that it was filled with UFO books. He said to himself, "Oh boy, here we go."

That's why so many ignorant people cherish false-defector-in-place in Geneva in 1962 / false (or possibly rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, Yuri Nosenko -- because he said the KGB had nothing to do with former U-2 radar operator Oswald during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

He could say whatever he wants. How about some evidence?

-- Fred

Evidence of what, Fweddy?

Max Holland does NOT accept what the historian wrote.

The segregated collection is online. You can search it yourself. There is no CIA document, except this one, that refers to a "contract source."

It is obviously a mistake.

The document was made by staff, not by McDonald himself.

Paul Hoch found another error in the document.

From my post:

It is important to note the McDonald summary document in question (which is factually unreliable for reasons apart from its description of Shaw) was not prepared contemporaneously during Shaw’s years of service to the Agency, but decades later. It was compiled for the purpose of describing a collection of assassination-related documents the Agency was preparing to release at the order of then CIA Director Robert Gates, months before the Assassination Records Collection Act became law. All of this material was given to the HSCA.

As for the document's reliability, researcher Paul Hoch has found another example of where this document was wrong. It refers to "records relating to Gilberto Alvarado, who maintained that he witnessed Cubans passing Oswald cash at a party on the night before the assassination." In fact, this description is obviously a confused mashup of two allegations that were separately made: one by Gilberto Alvarado in 1963 (which he ultimately retracted), and another, made later, by Elena Garro de Paz.

A different page in the 1992 document correctly describes Alvarado as "the Nicaraguan who claimed he saw Lee Harvey Oswald receive cash in meetings inside Mexico City Cuban embassy."

Elena Garro de Paz claimed to have seen Oswald and two companions at a "twist party" in Mexico City.

The date given for this twist party (November 21) matches neither allegation and is obviously an error, thus suggesting that the 1992 document is not exactly a completely reliable accounting of what is in the CIA's own archive.

https://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/post/was-clay-shaw-a-contract-agent-for-the-cia

"BC" wrote (my comments are in brackets):

TG --

1. The paragraph regarding Clay Shaw is high and prominent in the CIA historian's report [LOL], on a matter of intense interest. It is hard to imagine the description on Shaw contains inadvertent, multiple, and crucial typos in the key sentence that describes Shaw relationship to the CIA. I assume the historian meant what he said. That leaves possibility No. 2:

2. If the description of Shaw is intentional, as it obviously is [LOL], then you are assuming the historian and his staff made an error when they read through the HSCA documents -- but have you reviewed the contents of the 64 boxes they reviewed [wowie zowie!!!]?

Has Fred Lifton [sic], who claims the CIA historian, J. Kenneth McDonald, was in error due to mistakes he made in understanding "the underlying" documents [read the 64 boxes of documents that the historian and/or his helpers allegedly read]? Which underlying documents misled the historian [and/or his helpers]?

This is risible. Yes, Clay Shaw was [allegedly] a highly paid CIA contract source up until 1956 and likely [wowie zowie!!!] worked informally after that. Big deal.

Does that mean Shaw helped perp the JFKA? Very unlikely. [Bummer, dude.]

It would be interesting to find out if Bruce Solie, or someone else in the CIA, put Shaw onto LHO, the way J. Walton Moore (in Dallas) put DeMohrenschildt onto LHO.

Solie was intensely involved in the CIA monitoring and reaction to Garrison (says Blunt). [Wowie zowie!!!]

Why did Solie, ostensibly in counter-intel, get involved with LHO and Garrison?

 . . . . . . . .


My reply:

Dear "BC,"

To err is human.

For example, you mistakenly called Fred Litwin "Fred Lifton" in your post.

Along that same line of thought, I figure that one of J. Kenneth's helpers probably made the mistake of writing either "Clay Shaw was a highly valued contract source," or "Clay Shaw was a highly paid contact source," and J. Kenneth or one of his other helpers compounded the error by trying to "clarify" it.

It is interesting to note, however, that J. Kenneth compiled his report in 1992, one year after Oliver Stone came out with his self-described mythological ("to counter the myth of the Warren Report") piece of KGB disinformation known as "JFK."

Who's to say that J. Kenneth didn't get zombified by it as did so many other otherwise intelligent Americans?


-- "TG"


PS Malcolm Blunt didn't say, "Bruce Solie was intensely involved in the CIA's monitoring and reaction to Garrison."

He said, "There's a great mass of documentation. Solie is all over the JFK investigation, [and for] Jim Garrison, the person that's all over Clay Shaw is Bruce Solie. You know (to his assistant Bart Kamp), there are handwritten notes by Solie. He's the guy who was really sitting on the Clay Shaw stuff."