American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us by Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell Read Free Book Online

Service System Registration card and a Department of Defense Identification Card listing his height as 5-11. In the same wallet was a counterfeit Selective Service System Registration card under the fictitious name of “Alek James Hidell.” Hidell’s height was listed as 5-9. 17
    It gets stranger. Before he was buried, Oswald’s body was unattended when an FBI team came to spend quite a bit of time checking it over carefully and taking another set of prints, according to the Fort Worth Press . When an FBI agent looked up Oswald’s early medical history, a mastoidectomy and operation scar were noted on his Marine Corps health records, from a procedure he’d undergone at the age of six. But the post-mortem report of November 24, 1963, didn’t list any scar or bone removal. Paul Groody, the funeral director who buried Oswald, recounted a story years later. Secret Service agents, he said, had come to ask him questions about some marks on Oswald’s body and told Groody, “We don’t know who we have in that grave.” 18
    Richard Helms, who was then in charge of clandestine operations for the CIA, sent a memo to the FBI on February 18, 1964. Helms was interested in a scar that Oswald was supposed to have had on his left wrist, after he allegedly attempted suicide in Moscow in 1959. Helms requested any FBI information, “including the undertakers, copies of any reports, such as autopsy or other, which may contain information pertinent to this point.... The best evidence of a scar or scars on the left wrist would of course be direct examination by a competent authority and we recommend that this be done and that a photograph of the inner and outer surfaces of the left wrist be made if there has been no other evidence acceptable to the [Warren] Commission that he did in fact attempt suicide by cutting his wrist.” A week later, two Dallas FBI agents contacted C.J. Price, the administrator at the Parkland Memorial Hospital where Oswald’s autopsy took place. Price said “he failed to observe any scar on Oswald’s wrist.” Nor did anyone else, as far as he knew. According to a memo by Warren Commission investigator Slawson (March 13, 1964): “The CIA is interested in the scar on Oswald’s left wrist.... The FBI is reluctant to exhume Oswald’s body as requested by the CIA.” 19
    The new book, JFK and the Unspeakable, contains a fresh interview that brings even more credence to the “double Oswald” scenario. Author Jim Douglass tracked down a fellow named Warren (Butch) Burroughs, who was running the concession stand at the Texas Theater where Oswald was apprehended. He says Oswald came in sometime between 1:00 PM and 1:07 PM, which is several minutes before Oswald supposedly shot and killed policeman J.D. Tippitt seven blocks away. Burroughs sold him popcorn at 1:15 (the very moment of Tippitt’s slaying).
    Most stunning of all was Burroughs’s revelation that, a few minutes after the cops came rushing in to surround Oswald and half-drag him out the front of the theater, a second man who “looked almost like Oswald, like he was his brother or something,” was arrested and taken out the back of the theater. 20
    Burroughs wasn’t the only witness to this. Bernard Haire, who owned Bernie’s Hobby House two doors east of the theater, had also seen police bring “a young white man ... dressed in a pullover shirt and slacks” out the rear door of the theater, where he was driven off. Told that Oswald had been brought out the front, Haire was bewildered and said “I don’t know who I saw arrested.” 21
    You’ve also got witnesses at the Book Depository building seeing Oswald walk out the front and get driven off in a car, and more witnesses seeing him go out the back and take a bus. There are more witnesses inside the building who claim to have seen Oswald in two places at once. So there’s quite the