JFK Assassination Forum

BTW,

Good opening post, Bill Brown.

Thank you.

Part of the Texas Lore of the JFKA is that Gov. John Connally kept his grip on his white Stetson cowboy hat, even after being shot through the wrist, by the same bullet that first passed through President JFK's neck, then through JBC's chest, and only then through JBC's wrist. The same whole slug burrowed into JBC's thigh (and somehow mysteriously ended up on a hospital gurney, or below the gurney, several floors below JBC's operating room, by the WC version). That is C-399. Quite the adventurous bullet!

Nellie Connally said her husband held on onto his Stetson cowboy hat all the way to the Parkland hospital, although Nellie Connally also said the assassin's first shot struck JFK, the second hit JBC, and the third hit JFK. Such are the perils of citing JFKA witnesses, for SBT'ers and LN'ers alike. 

On a more authoritative note, Cyril Wecht, (now deceased) a renowned forensic pathologist and longtime critic of the Warren Commission (WC), maintained that it was physically and neurologically impossible for Connally to have maintained a grip on his hat if the "Magic Bullet" (Commission Exhibit 399) had actually shattered his radius bone, as the WC claimed.

The WC was, or course, was required to accept the Texas Lore, given that it had committed to the SBT, which meant that JBC was shot ~Z-223.

The WC version is, well, dubious:

"The SBT bullet entered the dorsal (back) side of his right wrist (thumb side), shattered the distal radius bone, and exited on the palm side. This path damaged nearby structures, including a partial transection of a dorsal branch of the radial nerve and a tendon leading to the thumb.

Dr. Charles F. Gregory (the orthopedic surgeon who operated on the wrist) noted this during the procedure. The Warren Commission Report explicitly references the "partial cutting of a radial nerve and tendon" as evidence that the bullet was already tumbling/yawed (not pristine), as it caught and tore these structures rather than pushing them aside."

OK, to reprise, the WC maintains JBC was shot through the right wrist ~Z-223, but was still holding onto his Stetson hat at Z-272.

Layman's view: I have never had a wrist shattered by a bullet. I was struck on the wrist hard enough (in an industrial mishap) once to leave bone bruises, or contusions, on my wrist. Yes bones can bruise and swell. The blow struck the dorsal side on the wrist. I could not have held onto my baseball cap through that experience, had I been holding one. I never had a Stetson.

Yet here is Gov. JBC at Z-272 still holding onto the Stetson, after having been shot through the wrst (and the chest).:



Note that JBC has made a near 180-degree in his seat, despite having been shot through the chest (by the SBT version). JBC is checking up on JFK, after hearing the first shot, JBC said. Those darn witnesses!

Side note: The telltale smell of gunsmoke hung in the air in the GK area in the immediate aftermath of the JFKA.

This gunsmoke could not have been from LHO's M-C, as the breeze was blowing from the GK towards to the TSBD---that is proven beyond dispute by women's skirts and coats fluttering in the wind.

Conclusion: The SBT strikes me as dubious.

The WC was driven towards the LN explanation by LBJ's fear that LHO-KGB-G2 connections could trigger a nuclear war. LBJ said so himself. For you younger folks, in the 1960s talk of nuclear war was nearly a daily event, especially during the CMC-1962. The possibility of a nuclear war seemed real, nearly tangible. Students practiced nuclear war drills once a week (that includes me!). Sears Roebuck started building bomb shelters under new stores in the early 1960s. Nelson Rockefeller floated a plan to finance every homeowner in America building bomb shelters under their houses.

WC members Russell, Boggs, Cooper all later said they disagreed with the WC conclusions.

The Texas Lore that JBC held onto his Texas Stetson Hat ...well, not sure about that. I lived in Texas in the late 1970s. Texas Lore and state pride are big things, and so are Stetson cowboy hats.

Caveat emptor, and draw your own conclusions.

Where's Jake Maxwell when we really need him???

History 101:

The reason Nixon formed The Plumbers was because a Kremlin-loyal KGB officer at the FBI's NYC field office, Major Aleksey Kulak -- J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA -- told him that the Kremlin had a complete copy of The Pentagon Papers (it didn't).

ME: Did the Kremlin acquire a complete copy of The Pentagon Papers before Nixon formed The Plumbers?

GROK: No, there is no credible evidence that the Kremlin (or Soviet Embassy) acquired a complete copy of the full classified Pentagon Papers before—or even around the time—Nixon formed the White House Plumbers (officially the White House Special Investigations Unit).

Key timelines

Pentagon Papers leak and publication: Daniel Ellsberg provided portions of the ~7,000-page classified study (officially "United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967") to The New York Times, which began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971. The Washington Post followed on June 18. A temporary restraining order against the Times was issued around June 15.

Plumbers' formation: The unit was created in direct response to the leak, established within a week of the June 13 publication (so by roughly June 20, 1971, per historical accounts). Some sources place related staffing or operations in July (e.g., Egil Krogh’s involvement around July 20), but the unit’s purpose—to plug leaks and investigate the Pentagon Papers disclosure—began immediately after the public revelations.

The Soviet claim

The only reference to a Soviet “complete set” comes from a 1973 Washington Post report (cited in contemporary coverage). It alleged that, in June 1971 (after the Times restraining order), an unidentified man using an alias handed the Soviet Embassy in Washington a full set of the top-secret documents.

The Soviet Embassy immediately and explicitly denied this on June 5, 1973, calling it “a fabrication” unrelated to improving U.S.–Soviet relations.

The story appears to have stemmed from FBI information tied to a supposed source in the KGB. However, the FBI later determined this source [Kulak / FEDORA] was fake or unreliable (detailed in a 1981 Washington Post article).

No declassified U.S., Soviet, or independent archival evidence has ever confirmed that the full classified study reached Moscow via this (or any other) channel in June 1971. The published newspaper excerpts were publicly available worldwide after June 13, but the complete 47-volume classified version is a different matter.

Context and why the claim doesn’t hold

The Nixon administration’s extreme reaction to the leak (including forming the Plumbers, the Ellsberg psychiatrist break in, and eventual Watergate ties) was driven by paranoia about further leaks and domestic political damage—not by any verified foreign acquisition. Nixon and aides viewed the leak as potentially aiding adversaries like the Soviets or Chinese, but their internal discussions and later investigations never treated a pre-Plumbers Soviet copy as a confirmed fact.

In short, the June 1971 Soviet Embassy story was a single, unverified (and denied) press report based on flawed intelligence. It does not establish that the Kremlin obtained the complete papers before the Plumbers existed. The full Pentagon Papers were not officially declassified until 2011.

ME: Did KGB Major Aleksey Kulak at the FBI's NYC field office mislead Hoover and Nixon into believing that it had?

GROK: Yes, according to declassified accounts and the FBI’s own later assessment, KGB officer Aleksey (Aleksei) Isidorovich Kulak—codename “Fedora” (sometimes referred to as a major or colonel)—was the source of the specific claim that a complete set of the classified Pentagon Papers had been delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Washington in June 1971.

Kulak had first volunteered to the FBI’s New York field office in March 1962 while serving under UN diplomatic cover as a KGB scientific/technical officer. The FBI ran him for over a decade (with a second New York tour beginning in 1971) as one of its most valued Bureau sources on Soviet operations. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon White House treated his reporting as highly credible.

The 1971 Pentagon Papers claim

During the height of the public furor over the New York Times and Washington Post publications (mid-June 1971 onward), Kulak/Fedora informed his FBI handlers that an unidentified man had handed the full 47-volume classified study to the Soviet Embassy. The FBI passed this to the White House. Nixon administration officials (including those overseeing the legal effort to block further publication) and the FBI accepted it as factual, heightening official paranoia about foreign exploitation of the leak. This occurred in the same weeks the White House Plumbers unit was being stood up to investigate and plug leaks.

CIA Director Richard Helms, however, privately discounted the report when briefing a Plumbers official. He told David R. Young (one of the unit’s chiefs) that the CIA knew the source and had “doubts about them.”

FBI’s later conclusion: disinformation.

By the mid-1970s the FBI had grown suspicious that Kulak was a KGB-controlled double agent feeding false information. A full re-evaluation after his 1976 return to Moscow (where he declined a CIA exfiltration offer) led the Bureau to conclude by 1981 [sic; in 1976 according to former CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley; this determination was overturned by counterintelligence-hating James Geer in the FBI around 1983 with help from CIA "analysts" provided to him by probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy, Deputy Chief of CIA Counterintelligence] that Fedora had been “always on the Soviets’ side.” The Pentagon Papers story was cited as a prime example of the disinformation he supplied. No independent U.S., Soviet, or archival evidence has ever corroborated that the Kremlin actually received the full classified set via the Embassy at that time.

In short: Kulak did mislead Hoover’s FBI and the Nixon White House into believing the Kremlin had obtained the complete papers. The information was treated as genuine at the highest levels in mid-1971 precisely because it came from a long-trusted FBI asset—who was later judged to have been a Soviet plant all along. This episode contributed to the atmosphere of suspicion that surrounded the leak response, even though the core claim proved unfounded.

Yep, the KGB*, the same folks who, along with GRU and Putin's professional St. Petersburg trolls, installed Donald Trump as our "president" on 20 January 2017.

*Today's SVR and FSB

RS: The Elm Ext is absolutely jammed with people.

Again, In the Darnell film you can see a white car parked on the north side of the Elm Street Extension. That wouldn't happen if the street were "jammed with people" Also, you can see people standing on the sidewalk running along the front of the TSBD. That also wouldn't be possible if the street was full of a crowd.  Speaking of which:

RS: You can even see people stretching across it in front of the Huge Gates.

These are the aforementioned people standing on the sidewalk between the TSDB and the north side of Elm. They aren't in the street, ipso facto.

When Martin is filming Harkness driving by with Euins, he's to the east of the area in Darnell where the crowd appears. Because he's filming in an eastward direction, you won't see the Darnell crowd that is standing between the dirt road, the first RR yard spur, and the pergola.

RS: And remember that the Nat Geo piece you are claiming was long after the kill shot, also shows Officer Harkness #99 3 wheel motorcycle sitting alongside Inspector Sawyer's car.

As I've already pointed out, this is much later than the Darnell and Martin film segments in question here. No question after 12:45, and probably more like 1PM, when the DPD shoos the crowd away from in front of the TSBD and actually ropes off the area around the building. That is more than enough time for Harkness to put Euins in Sawyers car, drive to the north side of the TSBD, and return to the front after he was "relieved" by arriving officers.


RS: the Officer Harkness check point.

In the Darnell film, you first see Harkness looking west, then walking back towards his three-wheeler parked near the end of the  cyclone fence. Not coincidentally, that's the area where Euins said that he ran into Harkness. Harkness explicitly testified that the area where he met Euins wasn't behind the depository. If that area wasn't behind the TSDB, then his earlier position to the west of his 3-wheeler was also not behind the depository.  The Darnell snippet is just before Euins tells Harkness about the rifleman in the window, and Harkness will soon after radio this information to the dispatcher at 12:36

    So you are claiming the Darnell film snippet showing Haygood, Harkness, and Walthers together is happening BEFORE Euins was loaded into Inspector Sawyer's car? Harkness made a 12:36 radio call that he was bringing Euins  to the TSBD. And Harkness gave WC testimony that he helped load Euins into Sawyer's car. What are you claiming Harkness did with Euins, if you are claiming Euins was NOT Loaded into Sawyer's car until, "12:45, more like 1:00"?
    You can Not get around the documented radio transmissions.  Haygood - 12:35 from the Elm St curb.     Harkness - 12:36.  That alleged motorcycle cop in the Darnell Film is NOT HAYGOOD. It is physically impossible for Haygood to be in 2 places at once.

Nixon was completely paranoid and formed an illegal group called The Plumbers to go after political enemies.

History 101:

The reason Nixon formed The Plumbers was because a Kremlin-loyal KGB officer at the FBI's NYC field office, Major Aleksey Kulak -- J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA -- told him that the Kremlin had a complete copy of The Pentagon Papers (it didn't).

ME: Did the Kremlin acquire a complete copy of The Pentagon Papers before Nixon formed The Plumbers?

GROK: No, there is no credible evidence that the Kremlin (or Soviet Embassy) acquired a complete copy of the full classified Pentagon Papers before—or even around the time—Nixon formed the White House Plumbers (officially the White House Special Investigations Unit).

Key timelines

Pentagon Papers leak and publication: Daniel Ellsberg provided portions of the ~7,000-page classified study (officially "United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967") to The New York Times, which began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971. The Washington Post followed on June 18. A temporary restraining order against the Times was issued around June 15.

Plumbers' formation: The unit was created in direct response to the leak, established within a week of the June 13 publication (so by roughly June 20, 1971, per historical accounts). Some sources place related staffing or operations in July (e.g., Egil Krogh’s involvement around July 20), but the unit’s purpose—to plug leaks and investigate the Pentagon Papers disclosure—began immediately after the public revelations.

The Soviet claim

The only reference to a Soviet “complete set” comes from a 1973 Washington Post report (cited in contemporary coverage). It alleged that, in June 1971 (after the Times restraining order), an unidentified man using an alias handed the Soviet Embassy in Washington a full set of the top-secret documents.

The Soviet Embassy immediately and explicitly denied this on June 5, 1973, calling it “a fabrication” unrelated to improving U.S.–Soviet relations.

The story appears to have stemmed from FBI information tied to a supposed source in the KGB. However, the FBI later determined this source [Kulak / FEDORA] was fake or unreliable (detailed in a 1981 Washington Post article).

No declassified U.S., Soviet, or independent archival evidence has ever confirmed that the full classified study reached Moscow via this (or any other) channel in June 1971. The published newspaper excerpts were publicly available worldwide after June 13, but the complete 47-volume classified version is a different matter.

Context and why the claim doesn’t hold

The Nixon administration’s extreme reaction to the leak (including forming the Plumbers, the Ellsberg psychiatrist break in, and eventual Watergate ties) was driven by paranoia about further leaks and domestic political damage—not by any verified foreign acquisition. Nixon and aides viewed the leak as potentially aiding adversaries like the Soviets or Chinese, but their internal discussions and later investigations never treated a pre-Plumbers Soviet copy as a confirmed fact.

In short, the June 1971 Soviet Embassy story was a single, unverified (and denied) press report based on flawed intelligence. It does not establish that the Kremlin obtained the complete papers before the Plumbers existed. The full Pentagon Papers were not officially declassified until 2011.

ME: Did KGB Major Aleksey Kulak at the FBI's NYC field office mislead Hoover and Nixon into believing that it had?

GROK: Yes, according to declassified accounts and the FBI’s own later assessment, KGB officer Aleksey (Aleksei) Isidorovich Kulak—codename “Fedora” (sometimes referred to as a major or colonel)—was the source of the specific claim that a complete set of the classified Pentagon Papers had been delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Washington in June 1971.

Kulak had first volunteered to the FBI’s New York field office in March 1962 while serving under UN diplomatic cover as a KGB scientific/technical officer. The FBI ran him for over a decade (with a second New York tour beginning in 1971) as one of its most valued Bureau sources on Soviet operations. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon White House treated his reporting as highly credible.

The 1971 Pentagon Papers claim

During the height of the public furor over the New York Times and Washington Post publications (mid-June 1971 onward), Kulak/Fedora informed his FBI handlers that an unidentified man had handed the full 47-volume classified study to the Soviet Embassy. The FBI passed this to the White House. Nixon administration officials (including those overseeing the legal effort to block further publication) and the FBI accepted it as factual, heightening official paranoia about foreign exploitation of the leak. This occurred in the same weeks the White House Plumbers unit was being stood up to investigate and plug leaks.

CIA Director Richard Helms, however, privately discounted the report when briefing a Plumbers official. He told David R. Young (one of the unit’s chiefs) that the CIA knew the source and had “doubts about them.”

FBI’s later conclusion: disinformation.

By the mid-1970s the FBI had grown suspicious that Kulak was a KGB-controlled double agent feeding false information. A full re-evaluation after his 1976 return to Moscow (where he declined a CIA exfiltration offer) led the Bureau to conclude by 1981 [sic; in 1976 according to former CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley; this determination was overturned by counterintelligence-hating James Geer in the FBI around 1983 with help from CIA "analysts" provided to him by probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy, Deputy Chief of CIA Counterintelligence] that Fedora had been “always on the Soviets’ side.” The Pentagon Papers story was cited as a prime example of the disinformation he supplied. No independent U.S., Soviet, or archival evidence has ever corroborated that the Kremlin actually received the full classified set via the Embassy at that time.

In short: Kulak did mislead Hoover’s FBI and the Nixon White House into believing the Kremlin had obtained the complete papers. The information was treated as genuine at the highest levels in mid-1971 precisely because it came from a long-trusted FBI asset—who was later judged to have been a Soviet plant all along. This episode contributed to the atmosphere of suspicion that surrounded the leak response, even though the core claim proved unfounded.