The Murder of JFK, Part 2: Counterfeit ID Planted in Oswald's Wallet?

By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News

18 October 15

 

n my previous article, I asked the question “Who found Oswald’s wallet at the murder scene?” 

Here, I pose another question: Was a phony identification card for “Alek Hidell” inserted into the wallet after Oswald’s arrest? “Alek Hidell” was the name used to order the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository the day JFK was killed.

Listen here to Dallas Police Department Officer Gerald Hill discuss the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. [Editor’s note: to cut to the chase, go to 3:17 in the audio file.]

Listen for what Hill does not say:

He does not say anything about “Hidell” or an identification card.

Is this omission significant? I think it is.

My previous article recounted the details. FBI agent Bob Barrett said he saw Oswald’s wallet in the hands of DPD Captain Pinky Westbrook at the scene of the murder of Dallas police office J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963.

The article also recounted that the arresting officer, Paul Bentley, told a different story. Bentley said he found Oswald’s wallet while frisking him in the police car after leaving the Texas Theatre, where Oswald was arrested on November 22.

Both men say that the wallet contained identification cards for both Lee Harvey Oswald and “Alek Hidell.”

So was Oswald carrying the Alek Hidell ID in his wallet when he was arrested?

He had not been previously seen using the ID card, or the Hidell alias. Oswald wasn’t carrying a “Hidell” ID card in his wallet three months before in August 1963 when he was arrested in New Orleans for fighting with Cuban exiles disturbed by his pro-Castro activism. After his arrest, Oswald said he was in touch with a fellow Castro supporter named “Hidell,” which was a lie.

Questions

If Oswald’s wallet containing the Hidell ID card was found on Oswald’s person on November 22, 1963, why do none of the contemporaneous police reports from that day say anything about “Hidell” or an ID card in another name besides Oswald’s?

Bentley did not say that the Hidell ID was in Oswald’s wallet until June 11, 1964. Bentley never testified to the Warren Commission.

The critical question is not so much whether you believe Oswald created the obviously false Selective Service card identifying him as Alek James Hidell. You can go round and round on that one. (Genuine Selective Service cards did not include a photo.) He could have made the phony card in his job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, a photographic production company, where he worked for a few months starting in late 1962.

A better question is why would Oswald carry that card in his wallet on November 22? It wasn’t like he was seeking notoriety after JFK was killed. When asked later that day if he had shot the president, Oswald denied it.

Only on November 23 did the finding of the “Hidell” card become public knowledge in a statement made by Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney.

That statement came just hours after the FBI allegedly discovered early on the morning of November 23 that “Hidell” had ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle thought to have been used in the assassination, and had it delivered to Oswald’s post office box address. Now, for the first time, there was a paper trail supposedly linking the rifle found on the sixth floor to Oswald!

Wallet disputed

Mark Lane, the attorney hired by Lee Oswald’s mother, told the Warren Commission that the Hidell card was only found in the wallet after the discovery of Hidell’s mail order rifle purchase. Nonetheless, the Warren Commission refused to let Lane cross-examine the district attorney about the Hidell card and the rifle.

The Secret Service men present for the interrogation of Oswald in the Dallas Police Department headquarters on November 22 recalled no questions about the “Hidell” ID card. And it wasn’t like they were totally in the dark. Oswald had referred to a man named ”Hidell” as a Fair Play for Cuba Committee leader and was asked about it on November 22.

From November 23 on, the witnesses who wrote reports on November 22 slowly began to remember that Hidell’s ID was in Oswald’s wallet.

Almost everybody’s story was different, which is noteworthy.

Law enforcement officers are trained to include all relevant data in their reports. It’s hard to think of anything more relevant than the supposed finding of the Hidell ID in Oswald’s wallet on November 22.

Were all these witnesses given a secret order to not mention the Hidell name? Unlikely.

Was the Hidell ID planted in Oswald’s wallet after his arrest?

None of the five officers who drove Oswald from the Texas Theater to the police station mentioned Bentley’s discovery of the Hidell ID in their reports, including Bentley himself.

More than a week after November 22, Bentley’s report of Oswald’s arrest says only that “on the way to the city hall…. I turned his identification over to Lt. Baker. I then went to Captain Westbrook’s office to make a report of the arrest.”

The date of the report was December 3, a rather disquieting 12-day delay, given Bentley’s claim that he went to Westbrook’s office to file a report immediately after the arrest. In any case, Bentley didn’t mention the Hidell ID.

Gerald Hill told the Warren Commission months later that Bentley had found the ID while en route to police headquarters, recalling that it was the same name that had been used to order the rifle. In contrast, hours after the Hidell ID was discovered, here’s what Hill told NBC:

HILL: The only way we found out what his name was was to remove his billfold and check it ourself; he wouldn’t even tell us what his name was….

Q: What was the name on the billfold?

HILL: Lee H. Oswald. O-S-W-A-L-D.

In a radio interview earlier that afternoon, Hill mesmerized the world by revealing Oswald’s time in the USSR and that he was a “communist.” 

What went unnoticed: On both occasions, Hill said nothing about the phony Hidell ID.

Bentley’s and Hill’s failure to remember the “Hidell” ID was contagious.

A review of the reports filed by other three officers who transported Oswald from the Texas Theater – Charles T Ford (December 2, 1963), Bob Carroll (December 3), and K.E. Lyons (December 4) – shows that none of them said anything about finding the ”Hidell” ID. 

Yet several of them later told the Warren Commission that they remembered the card.

They also claimed that the Hidell alias was passed on to Dallas HQ as they were driving Oswald to the police station at 2 pm – but there is nothing in the radio log.

It appears that the first reference about “Hidell” may have come from George Doughty at the Identification Section of the Dallas police at about 3:15 pm, passing on information about “a selective service card bearing the name of Hidell” to military intelligence officer Robert Jones in San Antonio. 

According to the military intelligence officer, his caller made no reference to “Oswald” aliases, multiple IDs, or that the ID was an obvious counterfeit because it had a photo!

Why would Doughty withhold any of that information? Especially that the draft card was an obvious counterfeit? It was hardly a moment to test the veracity of military intelligence.

Using the information about “Hidell,” military intelligence was able to cross-index “Oswald and Hidell” from files that were mysteriously destroyed in 1973. 

Right about the same moment that afternoon, Dallas Police intelligence officer Don Stringfellow sent a post to a different military intelligence officer inaccurately claiming that Oswald was a “card carrying Communist” and that he had “defected to Cuba in 1959.” By the end of the day, this information was sent to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base prepared for any attack to be launched against Cuba. Some people were ready to see an attack on Cuba.

Some basic questions should be asked: During that long afternoon, what did the Dallas police know about Oswald? Which officers knew what? And how? 

By 10 pm on November 22, FBI agent Manning Clements questioned Oswald and reviewed the contents of his wallet on the desk. Clements said that the Hidell ID was inside the wallet at that time, but Oswald wouldn’t answer any questions about it. Clements’ inventory of the wallet cites the Hidell ID, but was not dictated until November 23. 

Did Bentley plant the Hidell ID on Oswald on November 22?

Another approach is to look at the consistent statements made by FBI agent Barrett that Westbrook asked him about both Oswald and Tippit at the Hidell murder scene.

JFK researcher Jones Harris suggested that it was logical for patrolmen to avoid referring to the Hidell IDs in their reports. Aliases were common but were not within many officers’ areas of expertise – the authenticity of something like the Hidell ID might be entrusted to a “bunko squad.”

With a horrified world watching on TV, there was pressure to cinch the case as fast as possible and Oswald was the only suspect. In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising they left this troublesome area alone. Even Captain Fritz himself was cautious. His notes indicate that he did not discuss the Hidell card with Oswald while in the presence of the FBI and Secret Service on November 22.

It was only safe for lower-ranked officers to discuss the Hidell ID after the FBI summary report of early December 1963 (known as CD 1.) affirmed that Oswald had the Hidell card on him at the time of his arrest.

What Hill did say

Jones Harris conducted extensive interviews with Gerald Hill, who worked in the Personnel Division with Westbrook. Hill was a reporter who became a policeman. Harris trusted what Hill told him. 

I do not trust Hill’s story, for many reasons. The foremost is that Hill was photographed leaning out the window of the sixth floor at the depository, shouting that he had found something. It was determined that this photograph was taken at 12:55. But the official story is that the shells from the rifle were not found on the sixth floor until 1:15. I think Hill planted the shells.

Like a Johnny-on-the-spot, Hill was one of the first officers to appear at the Tippit murder scene minutes later. Hill said that when he arrived at the Tippit crime scene, he was approached by an unknown witness. Hill said, “the first man that came up to me, he said, ‘The man who shot him was a white male about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160 to 170 pounds, had on a jacket and a pair of trousers, and brown bushy hair.’”

The height and weight match the inaccurate FBI/CIA Oswald descriptionthat was provided by an unknown man minutes after JFK was shot but before Tippit was shot. Hill never learned the man’s name. Hill claimed that he turned the unknown man over to another officer. No one knows anything about Hill’s supposed witness. 

Hill said that he returned to the office at about 3 pm to write his report while it was fresh in his mind. Westbrook came up to Hill and excitedly recounted a long story about Oswald being in the Marines, married to a Soviet citizen, being a defector, a “communist” (which no one else remembers) and more – all of which Hill repeated on the radio later that day, as heard at the beginning of this article.

Westbrook had no crime investigation experience, did not wear a police uniform, and had no business being at either the Tippit crime scene or the Texas Theatre.

Because of Westbrook’s rank, he was in charge at both events. Hill was Westbrook’s confidant and cohort. Hill was transferred into Westbrook’s department just weeks before the assassination. Who knew more about the secrets of the members of the Dallas Police Department than Captain Westbrook and Jerry Hill at Personnel?

Were Westbrook, Hill, Doughty and Bentley working together? 

When Bentley examined Oswald’s wallet in the police car, did he slip the Hidell ID inside it?

Did Doughty massage that information, hoping to get a big reaction from military intelligence?

These assumptions would explain a lot if the wallet examined by Westbrook at the Tippit murder scene was the same wallet that Bentley claimed to find in Oswald’s pocket after leaving the Texas Theatre. On the other hand, if there were two different wallets, these assumptions may explain why the wallets looked so much alike.

The police work described here is what you’d expect when assumptions are made that the democratic process doesn’t matter.

The police work described here is what has led Americans from Robert Kennedy to Edward Snowden to risk their lives and their freedom. They understand that history is written by people who act on their convictions. Cases like the JFK murder are resolved when citizens summon their collective political will.

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Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and the author of State Secret. His work is cited in Salon founder David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, just released this week. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA

By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic

18 October 15

 

Administrators and student activists at the university are attacking core First Amendment rights in a bid to punish expression that offends them.

half-century ago, student activists at the University of California clashed with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a series of events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at public colleges and universities.

Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.

In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in urine, or to burn the United States flag.

All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.

What did UCLA students find so outrageous as to warrant the violation of the fundamental right to free expression? A “Kanye Western” theme party where students wore costumes that parodied rap superstar Kanye West and his celebrity wife, Kim Kardashian. For this, UC student activists would squander their inheritance.

Perhaps 18-to-22-year-olds can be forgiven for failing to appreciate what’s at stake in their activism. But UCLA administrators cannot be forgiven for complying with student demands to punish this free expression—a glaring illustration of their low-regard for the First Amendment, California law, and liberal ideals.

How did this happen?

Last week, when this controversy began, many news outlets reported that some of the fraternity and sorority members who attended the “Kanye Western” theme party wore blackface. While that offensive behavior would not change the First Amendment analysis to come, there is no evidence for the claim: The Greek organizations deny it and no published photographs from the party depict anyone in blackface.

“We have been asked to respond specifically to rumors that some guests attended the event in blackface,” the fraternity said in a statement. “It is important that we put this rumor to rest. Some of our guests attended the event dressed as miners in reference to the Kanye West song ‘Gold Digger,’ but their attire had nothing to do with race.”The Huffington Post has published a photograph that seems to confirm this explanation: a group of girls pose with a bit of soot smudged on their faces, but not covering it, and there can be no doubt that they are attempting to dress as miners, or “gold diggers,” because they are all holding plates of “gold” as if panning for it.

Others who objected to the theme party deemed it an example of cultural appropriation, a “microaggression” against black students, or deeply insensitive and hurtful.

“The sagging or baggy jeans that students wore to the party represent one of the most notorious African American stereotypes in fashion,” UCLA student Caleb Jackson wrote in The Daily Bruin. “So notorious in fact, that it has led several cities across the country to make sagging illegal. The racial undertones associated with this clothing style make its cultural appropriation highly offensive to Black students.”

Said Hanan Worku, another UCLA student, on Facebook, “Yes that’s right, a frat decided it would be okay to have their members repeat a part of history that demoralized, mocked and dehumanized African Americans/ And celebrate while doing it. They showed up with their chains and braids with stuffed butts for God knows what reason. True Bruin values amiright????!!!!! Not to mention all of this happened last night which happened to be a part of Black Bruin Welcome Week! Coincidence right??????”

Meanwhile, critics of the critics insist that West is a famous celebrity, not a stand-in for black culture; that stuffed butts were a reference to Kim Kardashian, who is white and of Armenian descent, not black; that there is nothing wrong with appropriating the dress of hip-hop culture, which is not the same as black culture; that it’s myopic for privileged student activists to focus on a frat theme party while living in a city plagued by police killings, homelessness, housing discrimination, and other injustices; that activists are giving Greek organizations too much power to set their agenda; and that college kids these days are oversensitive to the point of self-parody.

Those substantive debates are healthy and both sides raise plausible points.

It is salutary for collegians to contest such matters in the student newspaper, on campus, and on social media. Evidently, public discourse has changed some minds. Said the frat, “we sincerely apologize for the offense and hurt we caused to our fellow Bruins, especially those in the African American community ... We are grateful for the dialogue we have had so far, and we intend to continue communicating with our fellow Bruins about how SigEp and Alpha Phi can make this a learning opportunity.”

What’s unhealthy is the movement to suppress free speech at UCLA.

University administrators bear the most culpability. After hearing objections to the theme party, but before finishing an investigation into it, UCLA officials suspended the social activities of the fraternity and sorority, effectively punishing them without due process even as these same officials publicly acknowledged that they didn’t have all the facts. Moreover, university officials are abusing their authority merely by investigating protected speech in the first place. And the student newspaper is cheering them on, demanding in an editorial that the office of UCLA Fraternity and Sorority Relations take a more active role in preemptively clearing all party themes.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, one of America’s foremost First Amendment scholars, has published several Washington Post items explaining why these reactions are legally dubious. “The suspension of the fraternity and sorority is likely unconstitutional,” he wrote. “Costumes that convey a message are treated as speech for First Amendment purposes (see, e.g., Schacht v. United States (1970) and Cohen v. California (1971)). And a university may not punish speech based on its allegedly racist content; see, e.g., Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), which holds that a university may not discriminate against student speech based on its viewpoint.”

He adds that “interim speech restrictions imposed before a full investigation and adjudication have historically been seen as more constitutionally suspect (as so-called ‘prior restraints’), see, e.g., Vance v. Universal Amusement, Inc. (1980); and the prior restraint doctrine is applicable to restrictions imposed by universities, see Healy v. James (1972). But in any event, even setting aside the prior restraint doctrine, suspending an organization’s social activities because of the offensive message conveyed by the organization’s past speech violates the First Amendment.”

In a followup post, he notes that the Supreme Court has unanimously held that student organizations have the right to express “the thought that we hate,” a far more offensive message than anything conveyed by the Greek organizations at UCLA:

In that case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), the Court held that universities may require student organizations that get university-provided benefits to accept all would-be members — including ones whose beliefs are at odds with the organization’s principles (e.g., if an atheist wants to join the Christian student group, or vice versa). I think that was correct, for reasons I gave in this article. (The article was published several years before the Christian Legal Society decision, so it doesn’t cite that decision.) But the result is certainly controversial: The majority consisted just of five Justices, the four liberals plus Justice Kennedy; the four other conservatives dissented.

Yet even the majority made clear that, while reasonable and viewpoint-neutral restrictions on student group membership policies are constitutional, viewpoint-based restrictions on student group speech are unconstitutional:

Although registered student groups must conform their conduct to the Law School’s regulation by dropping access barriers, they may express any viewpoint they wish — including a discriminatory one. Today’s decision thus continues this Court’s tradition of “protect[ing] the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'”

So if a group wants to express hostility to homosexuality—or hostility based on race, or sex, or religion, or what have you—it has the right to do that. And that’s so even if the group seeks access (on the same terms as other groups) to generally available university property, services, and subsidies. And on this point, the Court was unanimous: The liberal Justices plus Justice Kennedy took this view; the other conservative Justices would have just taken this further, to secure student groups’ right to choose their members as well as their right to choose their speech.

On Monday, UCLA student Caterina Kachadoorian argued in a Daily Bruin op-ed that, as an Armenian, she wasn’t offended by the Kim Kardashian costumes, and that student activists at UCLA would do better to focus on black-on-black violence (a position that I find wrongheaded). Says a censorious comment beneath that article:?

I have sent Caterina Kachadoorian's letter to the Office of Internal Affairs. I have demanded an investigation into the Daily Bruin to determine how this hate speech was published. I have requested an internal investigation and firing of the staff member that allowed this hate and discrimination to be published.

This student impulse to demand that authority figures punish other students who say or do things that they don’t like could not come at a more inopportune time. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in a recent article at The Intercept, “One of the most dangerous threats to campus free speech has been emerging at the highest levels of the University of California system, the sprawling collection of 10 campuses that includes UCLA and UC Berkeley. The university’s governing Board of Regents, with the support of University President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the state’s legislature, has been attempting to adopt new speech codes that—in the name of combating ‘anti-Semitism’—would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism.”

He continued:

Under the most stringent such regulations, students found to be in violation of these codes would face suspension or expulsion. In July, it appeared that the Regents were poised to enact the most extreme version, but decided instead to push the decision off until September, when they instead would adopt non-binding guidelines to define “hate speech” and “intolerance.”

One of the Regents most vocally advocating for the most stringent version of the speech code is Richard Blum, the multi-millionaire defense contractor who is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. At a Regents meeting last week, reported the Los Angeles Times, Blum expressly threatened that Feinstein would publicly denounce the university if it failed to adopt far more stringent standards than the ones it appeared to be considering, and specifically demanded they be binding and contain punishments for students found to be in violation.

The San Francisco Chronicle put it this way: “Regent Dick Blum said his wife, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., ‘is prepared to be critical of this university’ unless UC not only tackles anti-Jewish bigotry but also makes clear that perpetrators will be punished.” The lawyer Ken White wrote that “Blum threatened that his wife … would interfere and make trouble if the Regents didn’t commit to punish people for prohibited speech.” As campus First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn put it the following day, “Feinstein and her husband think college students should be expelled for protected free speech.”

Students who value fundamental human rights, protecting unpopular activism, or safeguarding the political liberties of the least powerful among us ought to be lobbying for the most stringent free-speech protections possible, not undermining core human rights that have benefitted generations of marginalized people as a salve for outrage at a frat party. As the ACLU once explained in answer to the question of why it sometimes mounts defenses of speech that is racist or promotes intolerance:

Free speech rights are indivisible.

Restricting the speech of one group or individual jeopardizes everyone's rights because the same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you. Conversely, laws that defend free speech for bigots can be used to defend the rights of civil rights workers, anti-war protesters, lesbian and gay activists and others fighting for justice. For example, in the 1949 case of Terminiello v. Chicago, the ACLU successfully defended an ex-Catholic priest who had delivered a racist and anti-semitic speech. The precedent set in that case became the basis for the ACLU's successful defense of civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s and '70s.

The indivisibility principle was also illustrated in the case of Neo-Nazis whose right to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1979 was successfully defended by the ACLU. At the time, then ACLU Executive Director Aryeh Neier, whose relatives died in Hitler's concentration camps during World War II, commented: "Keeping a few Nazis off the streets of Skokie will serve Jews poorly if it means that the freedoms to speak, publish or assemble any place in the United States are thereby weakened."

The college students fighting to limit free speech or to punish free expression are courting tremendous harms that would ultimately fall disproportionately on the least powerful, most marginalized groups of the present and future––and as UCLA graduates, they are highly unlikely to be in either group, which may help explain their lack of concern for how their behavior could affect the less privileged. It is nevertheless incoherent for activists who say that they live in a system of white supremacy to empower state administrators to police speech at their discretion!

And all calls for university administrators to police the minutiae of campus life rob students of the opportunity to learn how to govern themselves even as they contribute to the spike in administrative costs that render so many unable to afford tuition. The notion that university money is best spent paying someone to sit in an office vetting the themes of fraternity parties sounds like the premise of a SNL skit.

To deflect criticisms like these, defenders of the student activists are using the increasingly common tactic of treating the fringe position of a small number of ideologically homogeneous progressives as if it were equivalent to the opinion of all black people. “When black students share their hurt and disappointment with something like the ‘Kanye Western’ party, too often we respond with the way we see things, and it’s usually accompanied with criticism about how incorrect we think the black point of view is,” Chris Tang, who is not black, writes in another op-ed in The Daily Bruin. “But there’s an issue with this because we are implicitly saying that we understand the black point of view, when in reality, many of us don’t.”

There is nothing wrong with a black student being offended by a theme party, and attempts to articulate such grievances ought to be met with open-mindedness and compassion. ?And frats and sororities should be more sensitive to how their actions will be received.

But there is no “black point of view,” a prejudicial notion that is so easily refuted that it’s a wonder anyone invokes it. There are plenty of black people––a majority, I would wager––who understand better than many other Americans the importance of the First Amendment to the history of the civil-rights movement and the future of other civil-rights causes. As if to underscore that point, the Los Angeles Times highlighted an open letter sent to UCLA by Michael Meyers, president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. He said that “as an African American civil rights leader” he had to speak out. “We are increasingly alarmed—and distressed—by the failure of public university officials to support free speech and diversity of opinion on campus,” he wrote in the letter to UCLA’s chancellor. “Diversity of opinion surely includes the right of students to contest orthodoxy and to poke fun at popular culture and celebrities.”

That is exactly right, and UCLA administrators should publicly apologize for acting to the contrary rather than caving to the illegal demands of student activists.