Robert Baer: CIA agenda was to dismember Yugoslavia

[PufPuf93]

I spent 3 1/2 weeks in Yugoslavia in early 1981. I was with the now exe wife and we visited with two university friends who were living in Belgrade. It was an interesting time as there was still an Iron Curtain and Tito had died less than a year prior. Yugoslavia was still in mourning and celebration over Tito. There was a flood event going on when we traveled through Macedonia and Kosovo and when we first arrived in Serbia (and Belgrade). There were troops helping the people because of the flood.

As foreigners, we had to check in at night with authorities (cops or hotel) and leave our passports in their care by rule. In practice except at higher end tourist hotels on Adriatic Coast, we showed our passports on checking in and that was it. When we went to the neighborhood cop shop near the apartment there was a delay and Tim came out all smiles and told us that the cops were uncertain as to what to do (as Tim and wife were Californian and Canadian respectively, had residence visas, and had never checked in and we were both Californians with USA passports. It was highly unusual for folks like us to be staying in a private residence. Tim came back out a second time smiles and laugher and noted that they asked him if he knew Clint Eastwood and told them he played tennis with him regularly in California. We only saw one other American tourist during the visit and he was Japanese-American Californian traveling with a backpack notable for a large Canadian Maple Leaf symbol.

We had a awesome visit there because of circumstance. One friend had lived there 8 years growing up when his Dad was with the State Department, the other friend had a fresh PhD in Linguistics from Cal so both spoke fluent Serbo-Croation. He was there working several archeological digs for his PhD, a joint project between Cal, University of Belgrade, and other universities. They were living in an old high ceiling royalist apartment near University of Belgrade. The apartment belonged to the elderly (in 80s) parents of friends of Tim's parents that were living in St. Louis USA. We traveled alone by train from Athens to Belgrade. We spent time around Belgrade, at the digs outside Belgrade, and took a short flight to spend two days in Romania with Tim's parents (his Dad was in State Department there). There was an observation deck on one of the taller buildings in Belgrade and I took a panorama of the city only to have a uniformed guard ask for my film. Each evening people would promenade on the main avenue by the university; the young folks looked like beatniks dressing in black and many of the women had dyed henna hair. One goal of the trip to Romania was to get delicacies not available, specifically coffee from Vienna. There was an embargo of some sort and the only coffee available in the stores was eratz coffee grain beverage. We traveled with coffee and had coffee gifts (for hosts) for the subsequent road trip. I still have a copper Turkish coffee set we purchased for the road trip.

Then we drove to Sarajevo and then to the Adriatic Coast at Dubrovnik. As we traveled, we visited natural and historical features. We had a rental Czech car, Zastava 101. Crossing the high mountains on the way to Dubrovnik, there was a traffic stoppage that lingered and the various cars, tractors, trucks, and ox carts grew. In front of us was an army ambulance with crew and we (or the Serbo-Croation speakers among us) were cracking up BSing with the soldiers. The soldiers were told we were modern Slovenians and that was why we dressed and talked funny (the rental car had a Slovenian plate). Of course the soldiers knew we were joking. They then went back to their ambulance and pulled out with sirens and lights flashing and waved for Tim to follow. We passed 100+ vehicles and what was going on was there had been an accident between a small truck and an ox cart in a tunnel. We had gotten an VIP escort by the Yugoslavian military through an accident scene while others waited.

In Dubrovnik we stayed several nights outside the old city in a then modern hotel that was full of bus loads of Russian tourists. We saw singing and dancing in the old city and the exe bought a beautiful white full length crocheted dress and a mess of silver filigree jewelry for a pittance. The next several days we slowly worked up the coast to Split. We stayed in private guest villas and each day watched the Sun go down eating fine fish and fresh bread and drinking local wines. We were treated as honored guests because every where we stayed they knew Tim and his parents. Tim and his wife flew back to Belgrade from Split and we continued up the coast. The last night was in Opatia. We stayed in an outrageous hotel room about 200 yards from this statue on the Adriatic. It was the Saturday and Sunday nights of Eastern Orthodox Easter and so beautiful with many flowers, the Adriatic was so blue.

http://cromedicalnetwork.com/wp-content ... patija.jpg

Yugoslavia was so much different than expected. People had what they needed and seemed very happy and open every where we went. The country was clean and in good repair except for the flood zones when we first traveled in from Greece. I always wanted to go back but things change and never had the opportunity and then the war started. Seeing Dubrovnik bombed on CNN was like seeing Disneyland bombed when it was 1000 years old. The stories of ethnic cleansing were hard to believe and then sobering. Heartbreaking.

There did not appear to be religious nor economic nor ethnic strife during our visit. I knew that the Croats and Serbs had been on different sides in WWII and was unfamiliar with Islam and Eastern Orthodox. We had visited cathedrals and mosques but none of us were religious though I was the only non-Jew. I had expected a gray country still scarred by WWII but found relative abundance and happy, friendly people, lots of color, and beautiful environment (farms, rivers, mountains, Adriatic) and (except for some industrial areas and bleaker parts of Belgrade) picturesque cities and villages.

I believe that the CIA and the like have the ability and agenda to foster the discord necessary to dismember a country, Yugoslavia is a case in point. Tito made and held together Yugoslavia. Outsiders like the CIA can always find local, state, and private greed head or demagogue actors to do the dirty work. The individuals that create such havoc deliberately are psychopaths.

I believe it can happen here in the USA now after spending 50 plus years thinking the idea ludicrous. I always thought that even if a group armed itself and went hostile the military and police authorities would quickly dampen any violence. What occurs to me now is that the media creates the conditions for strife and the authorities may or may not protect individuals or the society depending on the druthers of parties with something to gain and little to lose. I doubt if the USA holds together at least as a Democracy until 2200. I also believe that the CIA and the like have influenced domestic conditions within the USA since the agency was formed.

[Joao]

Thanks for that, PufPuf93. Some more photos from 2009--hopefully they're of interest and pardon the crap photography. (For the record, people were very friendly during my time there.)

Belgrade buildings destroyed in 1999 by American cruise missiles:

• Building #1, as seen above
• Building #2

Belgrade military museum:

• "Arms and equipment of a captured American soldier", as seen above
• "Part of the F117 ['stealth fighter'] plane shot down on 27th March 1999"
• "Container with pieces of graphite bomb used for destruction of Serbian long distance power lines" (!!!)
• Recovered NATO depleted uranium ordnance
• Recovered NATO cluster bomb, type BLU97 B/B: "The use of these bombs is prohibited under international conventions"
• Recovered NATO ordnance with warranty notice

Belgrade graffiti expressing anti-Kosovo-separatist (referencing the 1389 "Battle of Kosovo") and pro-Milošević sentiments:

• Graffito #1
• Graffito #2
• Graffito #3

Hand-made guns from the Yugoslav Civil War, on exhibit at the Sarajevo History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina:


Shrapnel and bullet marks in Sarajevo buildings (about a quarter of the buildings in the city were so marked, with many entirely gutted):

• Building #1, as seen above
• Building #2
• Building #3

Kovaci War Memorial and Cemetery in Sarajevo
(The majority of people buried there were killed during the siege of Sarajevo. Alija Izetbegović's grave is the gazebo-like structure toward the left.)

[kool maudit]

Interesting. Are you in Priština, or what has given you that perspective? If anything, I'd expect the counter-narrative to be prevalent there (ie, Serbians as drunk criminal aggressors).

I spent time in Croatia, Serbia and BiH in 2009, but was warned by Serbians to stay away from Kosovo (predictably so--just passing that along without endorsement). The civil wars were obviously still fresh in people's minds so I mostly avoided talking about politics and especially deep politics while there. I was left with vivid memories of all the shrapnel-riddled, burned out husks of buildings in Sarajevo, as well as of warnings to avoid the landmine-laden Bosnian countryside. Nasty business.

I am not there anymore, but I lived there for a few years and keep in touch. It was a generational thing a lot of the time. My Albanian friends who were over about 35 usually spoke Serbian as well as Albanian and had a certain qualified nostalgia for the Yugoslav ideal. Particularly in the city's music scene you would see groups of friends from different post-Yugoslav republics; a venue owner friend told me how heartbroken he was once he realized, in the early 2000s, that it might never again be easy to get to Belgrade.

He always used to tell me "it was our rednecks against theirs".

Most of the people I knew below 30, including many of my media colleagues in their 20s, were invested in an oppression/identity-centered version of being Albanian and even though they would try and be cool about Serbia ("we can't just isolate, there needs to be outreach!") you could tell they just didn't feel it the same way. None of them spoke the language.

[kool maudit]

These buildings on Knez Milosa are still like this.

[Joao]

It's kind of unfortunate that the following was posted on a Croatian website, since it will inevitably devolve into both sides calling each other liars. No surprise, though--literally everything published about the dissolution of Yugoslavia seems to be relegated to such a fate.

Emphasis added. The appeals to the sanctity of the press are, of course, comical.

Text, Lies and Websites
December 4, 2015

It’s funny how life works. I just finished a week long lesson on conspiracy theories for my journalism students. Before that, we discussed how the speed of social media can threaten journalism’s credibility. And then, I see two prominent Croatian news portals publish a fake interview with a former CIA officer, Robert Baer.

Baer is best known as George Clooney, who portrayed him in the award-winning-film Syriana. Baer has written numerous books about the Middle East, the CIA and terrorism. He is a frequent and vocal critic of American policy and appears regularly on the cable news circuit.

The interview
The interview, reposted on index.hr and dnevnik.hr purportedly has Baer admitting that as a CIA operative, he bribed Tuđman and Mesić to spread nationalism and hatred in the former Yugoslavia. Now, these allegations should immediately raise some eyebrows.

The fact that the interview is published by a fringe Serbian website, then a dubious Canadian website, should raise some loud alarms over its authenticity. Moreover, the fact that it is from a 2012 interview originally published on a British Serb diaspora website raises even more skepticism. Oh, and the article’s claim that the author met Baer while the former-CIA-agent was promoting Secrets of the Whitehouse, a book that… um… doesn’t seem to exist, is also troubling.

All that aside, with a scoop like this, I mean a well known CIA officer, best selling author, who frequently appears on CNN, claiming the US covertly started the War in Yugoslavia, why didn’t any other mainstream news outlet pick up this story?

Baer has appeared all over the news before, talking about how he was tasked with trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s. The mainstream media wasn’t scared to discuss that story, and yet only a few fringe websites covered these startling revelations, until that is dnevnik and index reported on the story.

Where’s Milošević?
All this alone should raise questions about the veracity of the interview. Now let’s get to the actual details, which fit perfectly with some strains of Serbian conspiracy theories about the War. The one person who refused the CIA’s money is none other than the Serbian right’s hero, Karadžić.

Interestingly, there is no mention of the main culprit in the War, Slobodan Milošević. I mean it’s a bit convenient that Tuđman and Mesić are named, and the leader of Serbia, isn’t. Baer supposedly then claims that Srbrenica was instigated by America and just as many Serbs as Muslims were killed there. The other tell-tale sign that this interview is a forgery is the language. What American would ever refer to Yugoslavia as “the motherland Yugoslavia?”

Evidence
I’m trying to teach my students that as journalists they must be rigorous about what they publish. Conspiracies exist, the CIA is involved in many of them, which puts an even greater onus on journalists today to get their facts right. Allegations of conspiracy must have a high threshold of evidence if they are going to appear in the mainstream media. To do any less threatens the credibility of one of democracy’s most important institutions, the press.

Of course whoever published this piece on index and dnevnik was probably thinking more about the number of clicks the post would get, than they were about its truthfulness. Sadly, increasing readership often wins out over maintaining accuracy.

It’s a sad day for journalism when a blog that’s usually about soup and mother-in-laws holds itself to a higher standard of accuracy than two of Croatia’s most visited news sites. And we’ve seen this in the past, like with the US media’s coverage of the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The rush to be relevant often pushes the truth aside.

Cody Brown

Cody McClain Brown has a PhD in political science from the University of Kansas with expertise in international security, political economy, American politics, and the politics of Southeastern Europe. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship from the US State Department for Croatia in 2011-2012. At the request of the US Embassy in Croatia, Cody has given invited lectures on the 2012 American elections in Zadar and Zagreb. Prior to his time in Croatia, Cody taught Introduction to Comparative Politics at the University of Kansas and was a Fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies. As a graduate student he taught Introduction to American politics at Oklahoma State University. From 2006 to 2008 he taught English at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2006 he studied Arabic in Cairo, Egypt on a scholarship from the US State Department. He currently teaches at the Faculty of Political Science and the Faculty of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb. He also writes the blogs Zablogreb, and for Croatian Radio Television, Love Croatia.

[AlicetheKurious]

Yugoslavia was so much different than expected. People had what they needed and seemed very happy and open every where we went. The country was clean and in good repair except for the flood zones when we first traveled in from Greece. I always wanted to go back but things change and never had the opportunity and then the war started. Seeing Dubrovnik bombed on CNN was like seeing Disneyland bombed when it was 1000 years old. The stories of ethnic cleansing were hard to believe and then sobering. Heartbreaking.

There did not appear to be religious nor economic nor ethnic strife during our visit. I knew that the Croats and Serbs had been on different sides in WWII and was unfamiliar with Islam and Eastern Orthodox. We had visited cathedrals and mosques but none of us were religious though I was the only non-Jew. I had expected a gray country still scarred by WWII but found relative abundance and happy, friendly people, lots of color, and beautiful environment (farms, rivers, mountains, Adriatic) and (except for some industrial areas and bleaker parts of Belgrade) picturesque cities and villages.

I believe that the CIA and the like have the ability and agenda to foster the discord necessary to dismember a country, Yugoslavia is a case in point. Tito made and held together Yugoslavia. Outsiders like the CIA can always find local, state, and private greed head or demagogue actors to do the dirty work. The individuals that create such havoc deliberately are psychopaths.

I believe it can happen here in the USA now after spending 50 plus years thinking the idea ludicrous. I always thought that even if a group armed itself and went hostile the military and police authorities would quickly dampen any violence. What occurs to me now is that the media creates the conditions for strife and the authorities may or may not protect individuals or the society depending on the druthers of parties with something to gain and little to lose. I doubt if the USA holds together at least as a Democracy until 2200. I also believe that the CIA and the like have influenced domestic conditions within the USA since the agency was formed.

Speaking as an Egyptian and an ardent Nasserist, I and millions of people around the world will always remember Tito as one of the giants of the Non-Alignment Movement that stood up so effectively to the imperialist bloodsuckers, thereby making his country, like ours, one of their prime targets for destruction. What was done to Yugoslavia is a massive crime against humanity, which foreshadowed the horrific 'successes' that we've witnessed since, in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, to name but a few countries that received the exact same treatment, following the 'balkanization' model inaugurated in Yugoslavia.

[Joao]

The soldiers were told we were modern Slovenians and that was why we dressed and talked funny

That made me smile. Those crazy Slovenians with their borders on Italy and Switzerland were always the most Westernized of the Yugoslavs. They were the first to get the hell out of the federation (with very little bloodshed, as well), and to this day are the only former Yugoslav country in the Eurozone. It's amusing to hear a real life example of how they were regarded within SFRY before all hell broke loose.

[AlicetheKurious]

Concerning Robert Baer, whether or not the interview is real doesn't make that much of a difference. Coincidentally, I'm currently reading a book of his, "The Devil We Know," about Iran. It's short and entertaining fun. He's a glib con artist, seamlessly intertwining fact, anecdote, some easily verifiable lies and historical errors along with huge gaps of missing but important information, all related in a tone of supreme confidence and with the pose of a total insider "ex"-CIA operative who's taking lucky readers into his confidence. Baer relies on the gullibility and ignorance of his target audience, and, given that the book is a "number one bestseller", plastered with gushing reviews from the mainstream American media, it's a winning formula.

If you're wondering why I'm reading it, it's because it was written back in 2008, and I was curious to see what narrative about Iran this "ex"-CIA operative was peddling back then.

[Joao]

Concerning Robert Baer, whether or not the interview is real doesn't make that much of a difference.

Kind of a strange statement. It makes a difference because, while the overall content may be plausible, it's feeding a line of propaganda which leads to darker things if left unchallenged (viz., that Serbia was entirely blameless for the chaos and attending atrocities of the civil wars--which is not to say there haven't been exaggerations and fabrications by all sides). A person may read that "interview" and find it reasonable, and then be predisposed to accept nastier things when encountering material which starts from a similar premise but moves onto uglier territory. I hardly need point out that's Propaganda 101--"mostly truth with selected lies, omissions, and distortions."

And just the fact that it's obfuscational bullshit is objectionable in itself, of course. The allegations about the CIA should be regarded skeptically without further corroboration. Does "The British Serb Magazine" really have a vested interest in objectivity? The ongoing information warfare on this topic is subtle and pervasive.

@kool maudit: Thanks for the interesting comments. But aren't Kosovars, including those aware of broader deception, still glad to have independence--even if NATO enforced? I might be, if I were in their position.

[tapitsbo]

I understand it getting harder to tell what's real the deeper you dig!

But I'd be fascinated to hear more of your best guesses about the deep background/context of the Yugoslavia break-up, Joao

[MinM]

The Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief Will Decide the Fate of Secret Documents on JFK's Assassination
Trump's Twitter fingers and the Grassy Knoll.
By Jefferson Morley, Rex Bradford / AlterNet
June 21, 2017, 7:09 AM GMT

Bob Baer, the former undercover CIA officer, has said the same. “There’s no sources and methods involved. Release [the records] and let’s clear this up.”

Et tu, Donald?

Sunday, 09 July 2017 19:51
JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 5
Written by Arnaldo M. Fernandez

After mixing Oswald with the anti-Castro and CIA-backed paramilitaries of Alpha 66 in a weird pot made of “special intent to kill President Kennedy soup”, Bob Baer keeps on blighting a big-budget TV show by ignoring the body of the evidence, writes Arnaldo Fernandez. With an insert by Milicent Cranor on the History Channel's version of the "jet effect".

For the fifth episode of the series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald,” former CIA case officer Bob Baer and his team moved from New Orleans to Dallas seeking to prove Oswald “had help in accomplishing his mission.” Aren't they putting the cart before the horse by widening the net in search of accomplices before having determined whether Oswald was the perpetrator? They are indeed doing so, because Baer does have a mission: Keeping the CIA out of the picture.

After mixing Oswald with the anti-Castro and CIA-backed paramilitaries of Alpha 66 in a weird pot made of “special intent to kill President Kennedy soup”, Baer keeps on blighting a big-budget TV show by ignoring the body of the evidence. The latter supports the same assessment given by J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon B. Johnson the morning after the assassination: “The case as it stands now isn't strong enough to be able to get a conviction. ”1

The Warren Commission (WC) has manufactured the case against Oswald with at least a wrong murder weapon (CE 139), a wrong bullet (CE 399), and a wrong shell (CE 543). Instead of weighing the evidence, Baer and his team commit a kind of Only Game in Town Fallacy: If a second shooter is not at hand, then that leaves Oswald as the lone gunman.

Bogus Testing

To throw out the prima facie evidence —in the Zapruder film2— of gunfire from the right front, Baer simply replaces Luis Alvarez’s melon with what they call an encased gel ordinance head. Which goes backwards after being struck by a bullet fired from behind.

A Nobel Prize winner in Physics (1968), Alvarez got involved in a test with a taped-up melon to verify that the backward snap of Kennedy’s head was consistent with a shot from behind due to a jet-propulsion-like recoil.3 But, as Gary Aguilar showed in his reply to Luke and Mike Haag, another test conducted by research physical scientist Larry Sturdivan at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1964 proved otherwise. Ten skulls were shot with a Mannlicher-Carcano and all of them moved away from the rifle in the same direction of the bullet. The Commission suppressed these findings and plainly reported that President Kennedy was struck in the head and “fell to the left into Mrs. Kennedy's lap.” (Click here for that article)

Alvarez’s test was misleading because a taped-up melon has neither the sheer strength nor the thickness close to that of a human skull. By the same token, Baer’s ballistic test is just another rigged attempt to support the discredited WC lone-gunman theory with a childish jet effect. We cannot do better than let Milicent Cranor comment at length on this ludicrous so-called “experiment”.

History Channel – or Saturday Night Live?

By Milicent Cranor

This segment of the History Channel’s special on the Kennedy Assassination seems like a low-budget skit from Saturday Night Live!

An “expert sniper” goes through the motions of recreating the shot to Kennedy’s head. The idea is to prove that one shot from the presumed Oswald location can cause the reaction we see on the Zapruder film: the head moving to the back and to the left.

It’s not clear what they’ve dug up to use for the head. The sniper describes it vaguely as a human head filled with ordinance gel, and throughout his little talk, he refers to that gel. As in “shooting from behind the ballistics gel” and “I’ve got the ballistics gel on target.” Maybe he hopes to convey the impression of a gelatinous brain causing the head to spring backwards.

The demonstration is just amazing. it is far more revealing than the show’s creators realize:

We only get a side view of the action – and are not allowed to see the back or front of the head, not even after the shooting.

The limited view of the head shows no damage whatsoever.

The head moves back, but not to the left. Then it pops right back up to its original position!

Something, possibly vaporized gel, seems to come out of the head (or from a smoke machine behind the head) – but only from the mouth area.

So he looks like a man leaning back with pleasure as he smokes a fine cigar, oblivious to the characters behind him.

The sniper’s explanation for what happened is even more amazing:

“…the bullet enters the back of the head and the terminal ballistics will come here -- [indicates area of right eye and forehead] – causing the head to go back and to the left.”

“The terminal ballistics will come here”? Terminal ballistics is defined as “the study of the behavior and effects of a projectile when it hits its target and transfers its energy to the target.”

The sniper can’t explain what happened, but he seems to think that by naming the field of study concerned with such phenomena, the audience will be fooled.

It is especially funny that he points to the area of the right eye: (1) In real life, the bullet is supposed to have exited from the top of the head on the right; (2) the gel-filled head in the demonstration seems to have no damage to that area, and it would show in a right profile view; and (3) all the exiting stuff representing brain matter comes out of the mouth. Neither JFK nor the head in this demo is supposed to have had an exit wound in the mouth.

Conclusion: The creators of this segment must have gel for brains. Or they think their audience does.

THE SMOKING MAN

As the reader can see, this is not a studious, scientific attempt to duplicate the circumstances that befell Kennedy at 12:30 PM in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas. And for Baer to try and pass it off as such speaks very poorly of both him and his show.

But Bob Baer is not done. Not by a long shot. For now he goes on and conducts what he calls an acoustics test. According to him, dozens of ear witnesses4 who heard shots coming from the Grassy Knoll were actually confused due to “the amphitheater effect.” The real sound coming from the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) would have echoed at the so-called triple underpass and other hard structures in Dealey Plaza.

To construct this “explosive theory,” Baer went to the crime scene with sound engineers and equipment that “nobody used before”. He just forgot to adjust the experiment setting to the standards of historical reconstruction.5 Not a single person was placed where a certain witness had been watching the presidential motorcade, and the sounds of the shooting weren’t generated by firing the rifle at the sniper nest. They were recorded elsewhere and played thereafter from near the TSBD. No kidding.

What is kind of shocking about this so-called acoustics test is that Baer completely ignores its far superior predecessor. During the proceedings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, (HSCA) that body did an acoustics test in Dealey Plaza. Except their testing was live and they brought riflemen into the plaza. And from that and their work with and analysis of the 11/22/63 dictabelt recording from Dealey Plaza by a Dallas policeman on a motorcycle, they concluded the following: 1.) Someone fired from the grassy knoll, and 2.) There were five shots fired that day. (Which, as Don Thomas reveals in his book Hear No Evil, for political reasons, Chief Counsel Robert Blakey reduced to four.)

But, if one can comprehend it, Baer completely ignored the HSCA precedent, which included two teams of the finest audio scientists in the country. Among their members was Dr. James Barger of the firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Barger had done acoustical research for the Navy in the field of submarine sonar detection, and had been involved in testing tapes of the 1970 Kent State shooting in Ohio. Barger did scientific testing of the actual sound wave patterns produced in Dealey Plaza at that time. Barger’s findings were passed on to Professor Mark Weiss and his associate Ernest Aschkenasy. They did the final presentation for the committee. To imply, as Baer does, that those three men spent as much time and testing as they did and could not separate an echo from a live shot is ridiculous. But Baer and his program are so agenda driven that it is as if these previous tests never happened. He brings in some audio recordings, some computer programmers, pays them a few bucks and with these stage props he has somehow eliminated the second gunman in the JFK case. Pure and utter poppycock. Baer’s level of science here would not pass muster at a good high school’s Science Fair.

An Inescapable Second Shooter

On December 12, 1963, the Secret Service (SS) did a crude recreation. Its black and white footage plotted three shots on the JFK limousine. The bystander James Tague —wounded by a bullet ricocheting off the curb about 260 feet away from the limousine— destroyed the prior three-shots-three-hits scenario. Then, the magic bullet emerged not from evidence, but as an out-of-the-blue solution engineered to sustain the lone gunman theory.

The FBI-SS reenactment on 23-24 May 1964 was a re-adjustment to preserve the willful closing of the case against Oswald. It also provided the notorious photo (CE 309) of Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter indicating with a metal rod the trajectory of the lie. However, an apparently insignificant detail provides a quantum of proof for demolishing any attempt—including Baer’s—to realign the shoots with the WC Report.

For the 1964 recreation, Specter used the same jacket worn by Governor Connally on November 22, 1963, but he did not use President Kennedy’s. Otherwise he couldn’t have aligned the bullet entrance hole in the back of both Kennedy’s jacket and shirt with the exit wound at his throat.6

The bullet holes are positioned 5 3/8” down from the collar line on the back of the jacket. They are consistent with the JFK death certificate, signed by his personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who examined a back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, about 4-6 inches below the point where the shoulders meet the neck.

At this level, a bullet coming downward from the TSBD would not be able to exit the throat. But the Commission acolytes do not care about the death certificate7 and dismiss the jacket and the shirt as material evidence with the claim that both bunched up. Let’s connect the dots in a simple test.

Baer is invited to come dressed in suit and tie, along with John McAdams, Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Phillip Shenon et. al.;
They will remove their jackets and shirts to mark the position of the bullet hole in Kennedy’s, and will also mark on their bodies the back wound given by the WC;
They will put on their jackets and shirts, and will take a back seat in a car8;
They will get their jackets and shirts to ride up until the mark on each one matches the mark of the back wound. This crucial moment will be photographically captured;
They will compare the photos with the Zapruder film to find not even the faintest resemblance of JFK’s tailored suit jacket and buttoned shirt bunching up as theirs.
They will surely face a dilemma. If the Warren Commission accurately placed the back wound, then JFK’s jacket and shirt were replaced, hence conspiracy; if the jacket and shirt are authentic, then the WC gave a false representation of JFK’s back wound, hence conspiracy or cover-up. There is not one whiff of any of these factors in the entire “Tracking Oswald” series, for if they did present it, the show would have to be called, “Trying to Find who Killed Kennedy.” The Warren Commission did not want to do that. Neither does Baer.

Oswald’s Escape and Another Crime Scene

After surreptitiously taking for granted that Oswald was the lone gunman, Baer applies his on-the-ground field officer expertise to assemble Oswald’s plan of escape with a concealed route, an Alpha 66 safe house, and some anti-Castro Cuban exiles as accomplices. No clue is given about how Oswald could have learned in advance the presidential motorcade’s schedule in order for him to have planned the assassination by firing a rifle with telescopic sight from his very place of employment.9 In that regard, Baer also ignores the following. That morning, Oswald asked fellow worker James Jarman why all the people were assembled in the plaza below. When Jarman replied that President Kennedy was going to pass through in a motorcade, Oswald asked him which way it was proceeding. Kind of wrecks Baer’s idea of Oswald’s planning. Which is probably why he ignores it. (See Syliva Meagher, Accessores After the Fact, Vintage Books, 1992, pp. 37-38)

For all of what follows, Baer relies on the bus ticket found in Oswald´s shirt pocket. The former CIA officer somehow never discerns the difference between getting to and from work, and around the Dallas area, on the one hand, and escaping from the scene of a high profile murder case amid hundred of witnesses on the other. But Baer uses the ticket to infer a getaway route from the TSBD to an Alpha 66 safe house. On the way, Baer loses the evidentiary trail that—since Sylvia Meagher´s research in 1967—has put the ticket and other circumstances of Oswald’s escape under a cloud of suspicion (Accessories After the Fact, pp. 70-93).

Baer deduces that, from his years of experience in the CIA, in a situation like this, the assassin(s) needed to have an escape route planned in advance. Our host does not want to admit that what the Commission says Oswald did after the shooting would suggest that he had no such plan in mind. Or that the latest research on this matter clearly indicates he was not on the sixth floor at all. (See Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs. Click here for a review) For the idea that a man who just killed the president would now search out public transportation to flee the scene of the crime amid hundreds of spectators and scores of policemen is simply not credible. But that is what the official story says. And that is what Baer is supporting.

In any real planning situation one would rely on one of two factors for escape amid a multitude of spectators. The first alternative would be disguise—of which there is no evidence in this case. The other would be speed. That is, the longer one stays at or near the scene, the longer one risks the possibility of exposure and/or capture. Concerning this subject, one could do as Josiah Thompson did at the end of Six Seconds in Dallas. That is, present the testimony of policeman Roger Craig. Craig says he saw Oswald running down the embankment after the shooting. He then jumped into a Rambler driven by a dark skinned man. That would sound like an escape plan utilizing speed. But probably because of that, Baer ignores it. So in his scenario, Oswald boards a bus, gets off the bus, then walks a few blocks, and hails a taxi. But before he enters, he offers it to a little old lady standing next to him. (Meagher, p. 83) With a straight face Baer pronounces this an “escape plan”.

Furthermore, Baer explains that Oswald ended up in the Texas Theater because of the run-in with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on East 10th Street, about 100 feet eastward from Patton Avenue. At that point, the escape plan was supposedly disrupted and Oswald failed to think clearly and rationally. However, as in the case of his alleged shooting of the President, the evidence against Oswald in Tippit’s murder is shoddy.10 And Baer ignores that shoddiness.

The crime scene is almost a mile away from Oswald’s rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley. His landlady Earlene Roberts saw him waiting for a bus at 1:04 PM after he left his room. Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the crime scene when Officer Tippit was already on the ground and some bystanders were milling around the police car. Bowley looked at his watch and the time was 1:10 PM. The Commission ignored Bowley. Why? Because clearly Oswald couldn´t have walked almost a mile in less than 6 minutes. They then reported that Tippit was killed circa 1:15 PM, despite the fact that is the time he was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital. To keep up appearances, a typed FBI memo stretched out Tippit’s agony at the hospital until 1:25 PM.

This case against Oswald for the Tippit shooting further weakens due to the three-wallets enigma.11 At the crime scene, Channel 8 staffer Ron Reiland filmed a policeman showing an open wallet to an FBI agent. According to FBI agent James Hosty, his fellow Bob Barrett revealed that this wallet contained IDs for both Oswald and Alek Hidell. But Dallas Police Officer Paul Bentley confiscated a second wallet from Oswald after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. And another one was found among Oswald´s belongings at Ruth Paine´s house in Irving. These are all facts. They strongly suggest some evidence against Oswald was planted. They are ignored by Baer.

Let us add another point about the two constant refrains by Baer during the program. First, the continuing assumption that Oswald is the guilty party. This, as we have seen, he achieves only by ignoring the evidence, especially the new evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). And that relates to the second refrain: that Baer has read through the two million pages of declassified documents by the ARRB. Yet this program offers no evidence from that declassification process. For instance, Baer presents a four-decades-old police report that Oswald was seen at an Alpha 66 safehouse in the Dallas area. The other document used in this episode is the famous testimony of Antonio Veciana of him seeing Oswald with Maurice Bishop at the Southland Building in Dallas. Again, that information extends back to the seventies. And it does not at all connect Oswald with Alpha 66. Veciana was arriving to meet with his case officer Bishop at the time. He was early, and he saw Bishop with Oswald. Oswald left shortly after he arrived. In other words, Oswald was there with Bishop, not with Alpha 66 leader Veciana. And as Veciana later admitted—just three years ago—Bishop was David Phillips.

Now if Bob Baer was really interested in furnishing the public with new information, he could have done at least a couple of things with that crucial admission. First, he could have said that the ARRB discovered that Phillips (along with James McCord) was running the CIA’s counter-intelligence programs against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Oswald was the only member in New Orleans. When one combines that with the fact that Oswald worked out of the same building that former FBI agent Guy Banister did, 544 Camp Street; and he printed that Camp Street address on more than one of his flyers, then that meeting with Phillips gets interesting. Why would an alleged communist like Oswald be meeting with a CIA officer and working with a former FBI agent?

The other aspect that could have been made up of new information would have been Phillips running the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there. Baer could have told the public:

The man Oswald was meeting with, David Phillips, told the HSCA that there were no tapes or pictures of Oswald in Mexico City. Yet there was such a tape that FBI agents listened to in Dallas while Oswald was under arrest for murder. Those agents told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that this tape was not the voice of the man in detention. We are going to explore that apparent quandary tonight.

But, of course, Baer could not do that since he began the show by using a lot of questionable material about the Russians controlling Oswald in Mexico City, when the declassified Lopez Report strongly suggests that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City. So the true identity of Oswald is kept under wraps, and some mythical association with Alpha 66 is now manufactured out of next to nothing.

Coda

More than fifty years and zero evidence after the JFK assassination, Baer is oddly not interested in or ignorant of what has been proven and debunked. He simply pushes back to square one—the lone gunman who shot a magic bullet—by concocting a light version (Castro knew it) of the oldest CIA backstop (Castro did it) through the fact-free hypothesis of Oswald linked somehow to Alpha 66 in the killing.

Notes

1 White House Telephone Transcripts, 23 November 1963, LBJ Library.

2 In his remark to Attorney General Robert Kennedy about two people involved in the shooting, CIA Director John McCone wasn’t speculating. He had been briefed by Art Lundahl, head of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where leading photo analyst Dino Brugioni and his team examined the Zapruder film, made still enlargements of select frames, and mounted them on briefing boards. See Dan Hardway’s “Thank you, Phil Shenon” (AARC, 2015).

3 Thus, Alvarez joined the crew of dueling experts devoted to defending the WC at any cost, after the Zapruder film was available for the first time to a mass audience on March 6, 1975, thanks to HSCA consultant Robert Groden and JFK activist Dick Gregory, who brought it to Geraldo Rivera’s ABC show “Good Night America.”

4 Baer uses his own statistics, but the most reliable study, 216 Witnesses, by Stewart Galanor, found that 52 heard a shot from Grassy Knoll, 48 from TSBD, 5 from both places and 4 elsewhere. Other 37 witnesses could not tell and 70 more were not asked.

5 The WC acolytes always incur this failure. For instance, it’s well-known since Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement (The Bodley Head, 1966) that WC’s firearms experts were unable to duplicate what Oswald did, but Vincent Bugliosi replied in Reclaiming History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) that CEs 582 to 584 “shows two hits were scored on the head” (p. 1005) – only that both were scored using iron sights instead of scope.

6 The FBI Supplemental Report from January 13, 1964, contains Exhibits 59 and 60 showing the bullet entrance holes in the back of Kennedy’s jacket and shirt, respectively. They weren’t included in any of the 26 volumes of Commission Exhibits. The initial draft of the WC report stated: “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” WC member Gerald Ford wanted it to read: “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” After the ARRB declassification, the discrepancy emerged. Ford told reporters: “My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.” (AP, July 3, 1997).

7 Specter neither produced it nor interviewed Admiral Burkley, who as JFK’s personal physician was the only doctor present both at the Parkland Hospital (Dallas) in the emergency room and at Bethesda Medical Center (Maryland) during the autopsy.

8 It could be the Cadillac used by Specter instead of the presidential limousine (Lincoln Continental 1961).

9 For these and other similar issues, see A.M. Fernandez’s “Why the Warren Commission got scared with Castro”.

10 Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, Hightower Press, 2013, pp. 244 ff.

11 James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, pp. 101 ff.

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