Mary's Mosaic (54 page)

“Hawkeye had the capability to do almost anything with any film product,” recalled Brugioni. While there is still debate among Kennedy assassination researchers as to whether the Zapruder film has been altered, the recent revelations by Dino Brugioni, along with Homer McMahon’s 1997 interview at the ARRB, clearly underscore the likelihood of alteration. That alteration plausibly could have taken place sometime after early Sunday morning, when the original 8-millimeter film left NPIC, and before Sunday night, when some
version
of the film returned to NPIC in a 16-millimeter format. The CIA’s Hawkeye facility in Rochester was the ideal place, technically superior and capable of such an alteration. “They could do anything,” Brugioni repeated emphatically.

Interviewed once on the telephone and twice in person by the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Homer McMahon was blunt, his statements staggering. After reviewing the 16-millimeter film at NPIC that Sunday evening, November 24, with his assistant Morgan Bennett Hunter, he
was sure, he told the ARRB, that “about eight (8) shots” had been fired at the president’s limousine.

“[As to how many shots were fired] what was it that you observed on the film’s examination, in your opinion?” asked Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel to the ARRB.

“About eight shots,” said the former NPIC employee Homer McMahon in 1997.

“And where did they come from?” Gunn further inquired.

“Three different directions, at least,” replied McMahon. “I expressed my opinion that night, but it was already preconceived. I did not agree with the analysis at the time. I didn’t have to. I was [just] doing the work. That’s the way I felt about it. It was preconceived. You don’t fight city hall. I wasn’t there to fight them. I was there to do the work.”

“Do you remember what [Secret Service agent] Smith’s analysis was?” asked Douglas P. Horne, chief analyst for military records at the ARRB.

“He thought there were three (3) shots,” recalled McMahon. “He went with the standard concept, that Oswald was the shooter.”
²⁴

When I interviewed Dino Brugioni in 2009, he was both shocked and mystified when he heard about the subsequent Zapruder film event that had taken place at the NPIC Sunday evening (November 24). As the NPIC on-call duty officer during the assassination weekend, Brugioni should have been notified. He wasn’t, and for good reason. Why? Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter had assisted in the preparation of a set of briefing boards that were significantly different in size and composition (as well as, presumably, in image content) from those made on Saturday night by Brugioni and his colleagues. When shown photos of the one surviving set of Homer McMahon’s briefing boards made on November 24, Brugioni categorically told me that they were
not
the briefing boards he had made on Saturday night.
²⁵
It appeared that the skulduggery that had taken place was known only at the highest levels, part of a well-organized cover-up, to which even mid-to-upper level CIA officers like Brugioni weren’t privy.

In the spring of 2011, I visited Dino Brugioni at his home in Virginia to further discuss the Zapruder film. I showed him a high-resolution image of the one and only frame in the extant Zapruder film that graphically depicts the fatal head shot, frame 313. Dino was incredulous there was
only
one frame of the head explosion—then repeatedly rejected the possibility, based upon what he had personally witnessed when he had viewed the camera-original Zapruder film on Saturday evening, November 23, 1963. I asked him several
times, “Was there more than one frame?” Dino responded unequivocally there was indeed:

“Oh yeah! Oh yeah … I remember all of us being shocked…. it was
straight up
[gesturing high above his own head] …
in the sky.
… There should have been more than one frame…. I thought the spray was, say, three or four feet from his head…. what I saw was more than that [in the image of frame 313 being shown to him] … it wasn’t low [as in frame 313], it was high …
there was more than that in the original….
It was way high off of his head … and I can’t imagine that there would only be one frame. What I saw was more than you have there [in frame 313].”
²⁶

Why was it necessary to alter the film and produce a different version of what had occurred? According to AARB staff member Douglas P. Horne, author of the 2009 five-volume
Inside the Assassination Records Review Board
, “they had to remove whatever was objectionable in the film—most likely, the car [the president’s limousine] stop, seen by over fifty witnesses in Dealey Plaza, and the exit debris which would inevitably have been seen in the film leaving the
rear
of President Kennedy’s head. They would also have had to add to the film whatever was desired—such as a large, painted-on exit wound generally consistent with the enlarged, altered head wound depicted in the autopsy photos, which were developed the day before on Saturday, November 23, by Robert Knudsen at NPC [Naval Photographic Center] Anacostia.”
²⁷
Horne was adamant in his book about the falsity of the photographic record:

The brain photographs in the National Archives today
cannot be,
and are not
[Horne’s emphasis], photographs of President Kennedy’s brain. This we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. The purpose for creating this false photographic record was to suppress evidence that President Kennedy was killed by a shot or shots from the front, and to insert into the record false “evidence” consistent with the official story that he was shot only from behind. This discovery is the single most significant “smoking gun” indicating a government cover-up within the medical evidence surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination, and is a direct result of the JFK Records Act, which in turn was fathered by the film
JFK
.
²⁸

Simply put, the conspiracy to murder the president, if it were to succeed, had to be matched by an equal, and perhaps more elaborate, conspiracy to
manipulate the evidence to support the contrived narrative of only three shots, all fired from
behind
the president’s motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, from one rifle, by one man. While eyewitness accounts in general are often vulnerable to misinterpretation, physical forensic evidence is much less so, and therefore poses a far greater challenge.

The most significant efforts were applied to the manipulation of physical evidence with respect to the gunshot wounds inflicted on President Kennedy’s body. As documented by David Lifton in
Best Evidence
(1980), President Kennedy’s body did not make an uninterrupted journey from Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas to Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, D.C. As Lifton explained in his bestselling and carefully documented forensic thriller, President Kennedy’s body left Dallas in an ornamental, bronze ceremonial casket, wrapped in cloth bedsheets—and yet it arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in a cheap, gray shipping casket, encased in a zippered, rubberized body bag.

As Lifton pointed out, there was a
possibility
that some—or all—of the president’s wounds had been tampered with prior to the arrival of his body at Bethesda. Indeed, the entry wound in the throat had been enlarged—obliterated, actually—by the time the Bethesda autopsy began at 8:15
P.M
., and the posterior head wound had been dramatically enlarged to five times its original size, so that it encompassed not just the rear of the skull, as it had when first seen in Dallas, but the top and the right side as well, when examined at Bethesda. Lifton also presented persuasive evidence that Kennedy’s shipping casket arrived at Bethesda close to fifteen minutes
prior
to the official motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base carrying the bronze Dallas casket. This meant that the bronze Dallas casket seen by millions on television was empty when it was off-loaded from Air Force One at Andrews. In 1997, the ARRB obtained an official military report that verified,
beyond all reasonable doubt
, the earlier arrival of President Kennedy’s body at Bethesda, thus proving there had been a break in the chain of custody of the body, prior to the autopsy. ARRB staff member Douglas Horne, in his 2009 book
Inside the Assassination Records Review Board
, using new evidence gleaned from the ARRB’s ten autopsy witnesses, provided confirmation of Lifton’s 1980 hypothesis that President Kennedy’s wounds had, in fact, been altered prior to the commencement of the 8:15
P.M
. Bethesda autopsy.
²⁹

Both Douglas Horne and David Lifton agree today that the entry wound in President Kennedy’s throat was crudely tampered with in transit, prior to the body’s arrival at Bethesda. But whereas Lifton speculated in his book that Kennedy’s head wounds were surgically altered prior to arrival at Bethesda, Horne
has presented a compelling case that postmortem surgery—forensic tampering—was actually performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital
prior
to the start of the official autopsy. All the facts point to the conclusion that evidence tampering of the most serious nature—the clandestine expansion of JFK’s head wound and the removal of evidence (bullet fragments and brain tissue)—was performed by Dr. James J. Humes, the lead Navy pathologist, as part of a Navy cover-up of the medical evidence,
after
President Kennedy’s body arrived at 6:35
P.M
., and
before
the start of the official autopsy at 8:15. The autopsy photos and x-rays in the National Archives collection today, Horne has concluded, actually demonstrate the results of clandestine surgery performed by the Naval pathologist,
not
the damage caused by bullets in Dallas. This was, and remains, an intentional misrepresentation by the U.S. government.
³⁰

Horne and Lifton are also in agreement that the “best evidence”—the body of the deceased president—was surgically altered to (1) remove evidence prior to the autopsy, and (2) to radically change the appearance and size of both the head wound and the entry wound in the throat, so that they were much more compatible with the myth of one lone shooter firing from behind the motorcade. All evidence of frontal entry on President Kennedy’s body was surgically removed prior to the commencement of his autopsy.
³¹
As of 2012, Douglas Horne and David Lifton have together established the clear-cut obstruction of justice that took place in the forensic alteration of President Kennedy’s wounds. No longer speculation, it is now an undeniable fact.

A
nd that is why one problem in the immediate aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination wouldn’t go away—a piece of conspiracy evidence available to Mary Meyer and anyone else observing events unfolding in “real time” in the media. After the president had been declared dead, the two attending physicians in Dallas, Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Kemp Clark, gave a short press conference. According to Tom Wicker of the
New York Times
, the two physicians described the president’s throat wound on the afternoon of the assassination: “Mr. Kennedy was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple,” they said. “This would have had the appearance of a bullet’s entry.”
³²
In fact, when Dr. Perry was asked by a reporter at the press conference immediately following the announcement of President Kennedy’s death, he confirmed this opinion—that President Kennedy’s throat wound was an entrance wound. If the government was about to declare that all shots came from behind the president, Dr. Perry was unknowingly, and indirectly,
asserting there had been more than one shooter, again making the president’s assassination by definition a conspiracy.

That evening after the press conference, according to Audrey Bell, the nurse who had been the supervisor of the operating and recovery rooms at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dr. Perry was harassed by a barrage of telephone calls all through the night “from people at Bethesda Naval Hospital who were trying to get him to change his mind about the opinion he had expressed at the Parkland Memorial Hospital press conference the day before; namely, that President Kennedy had an entry wound in the front of his neck.” In an interview by ARRB members Douglas P. Horne and Jeremy Gunn on March 20, 1997, Audrey Bell confirmed her conversation with Dr. Perry when, on the morning of November 23, she had learned about the pressure he was being subjected to.
³⁴
The second conspiracy—the cover-up—had been under way immediately after the assassination.