A Dismantling of "JFK Assassination: 60 Years Later, Crucial Alibi Dismantled"

une folie classique d’auto-tromperie!

The piece under discussion can be found here in its original form. It is by Russ Baker and/or assorted members of his research team.

I’d like to introduce you to one of the most fascinating figures you’ve not heard of, a man whose secretive activities should have gotten the close scrutiny of officials investigating who killed John F. Kennedy — had there been a serious investigation. 

This man owned the building from which, we are told, Lee Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy. He was rich and powerful and well known in his time. He’s all but forgotten today. I came upon him while working on my previous book, Family of Secrets, and trying to understand how it was that Oswald fortuitously obtained a job in a building that turned out to be at a critical spot in a motorcade route supposedly determined later. 

Oswald’s presence in that building at that time has always been characterized officially as a stroke of luck for him and bad luck for the country. We’ve always been told that Oswald couldn’t have known the details of a not-yet-announced Kennedy visit, and certainly not a specific route for a possible motorcade, past a particular building, when he applied for his job. 

So he just happened to be there, and then, we are told, decided spontaneously to bring a rifle and kill Kennedy, a highly suspicious concatenation of coincidences.

This constitutes a reasonable start, with a standard conspiracy take. It goes south quickly from here.

And what does all this have to do with the man who owned the notorious Texas School Book Depository Building? 

We’ve discovered some things that mean this man will need a close reexamination. Most startling is that he wasn’t where he said he was for most of November 1963. And that raises serious questions about why he would engage in a deception — a pretty elaborate one too, as you’ll see — about where he was for the period of the assassination, which was seemingly committed from his building.  

Firstly how do you reexamine someone you just got through claiming had escaped any examination?

As for his whereabouts – he said he had been on Safari in Africa. As we shall see, that was true and claims to the contrary are based on some sloppy research and false assumptions. This is troubling coming as it does, from a vaunted investigative journalist with a slew of assistants at his disposal. I am solo, and on the other side of the world. I have no paid journalistic experience, yet it took me all of five minutes to demolish the premises that follow.

Meet Harold Byrd – LBJ’s Boss?

The man I am talking about is David Harold Byrd, who commonly went by D.H. or Harold Byrd. He’s fascinated me for years. Born at the turn of the 20th century, he struck it rich in oil, then expanded over the years until he became a true cross-industry tycoon, with major holdings in everything from uranium mining to military contracting. 

He acquired a high-powered set of friends, in particular Lyndon Johnson, one of John F. Kennedy’s opponents for the 1960 Democratic nomination — a man who made it known he hated the Kennedys, was jealous of them, and couldn’t wait to be president himself, though he also knew he was unlikely to win the office outright at the ballot box. 

Johnson told a friend he was well aware that numerous presidents had died in office and, being a betting man, he’d take his chance in accepting the vice-presidential slot under Kennedy. 

Byrd and Johnson were really close. So close that Byrd was not above trying to boss Johnson around — and that is no small claim. Once, piloting his private plane, Byrd radioed Johnson at his ranch and announced he was going to land. President Johnson must have been busy, because he told Byrd not to. Byrd went ahead and landed anyway. 

Keep that in mind when you consider the amazing stroke of luck that Oswald got a job in Byrd’s Dallas building before any ordinary citizen could have known that a presidential motorcade would pass by. And then consider that some people did know — the very people who were working on and pushing for the motorcade to happen, including Texan Lyndon Johnson — a man whose political career was teetering on the brink, and whose own people were instrumental in managing Kennedy’s trip to Dallas from day one. 

There also seems to have been an intent to obscure the importance of Byrd’s building. Even at this late date, 60 years after the fact, it’s unclear exactly who made the fateful decision to divert the motorcade from its initially planned route straight down Main Street onto, instead, a sharp dogleg turn that would take it past the Book Depository at low speed. 

Conflicting accounts given by Secret Service agents and Dallas police officers over the years have only further muddied the waters. And Johnson and his associates, including Texas Gov. John Connally, repeatedly insisted — despite much evidence to the contrary — that it was JFK and the White House pushing for the Texas trip all along.  Evidence shows Connally was adamant that Kennedy speak at a particular venue — a venue that necessitated the motorcade traveling through downtown Dallas and near the Book Depository. 

Conflicting accounts by witnesses to conspiracy authors is hardly startling. It is a mainstay of conspiracy fodder, with witnesses either giving the author what they want – often being led to that answer – or engaging in good old fashioned buck-passing, finger-pointing or ass-covering.

The Trade Mart was always going to be the location of the luncheon. This is illuminated by the fact that Lawson and Sorrels test drove the route from Love Field to the Trade Mart before a final decision had been made, No similar “test run” was done in regard to the other option – the Women’s Building at the State Fair Grounds. The route settled on was the exact same route that had been taken in a motorcade by Kennedy during the 1960 election campaign – right down to going past 411 Elm – the future location of the Texas School Book Depository. You did not need to be Nostradamus to know this was going to be the route again. It was never an initially planned route straight down Main Street as stated by Baker.

As for the decision to use the Trade Mart over the Women’s Building – that was the recommendation of both Sorrels and Lawson. O’Donnell merely rubber stamped it, allowing the deflection of “blame” to the White House. Did Sorrels and Lawson push for the Trade Mart on behalf of conspirators? That is the 64 dollar question. Though no proof ever seems likely, the probable answer is “yes”.

A Lineup of Linchpins
OK, but what about Byrd? To understand his significance to the tragedy that played out on November 22, 1963, you need to know something about his circle of powerful friends and colleagues. Byrd was close buddies with a whole raft of people at the pinnacle of the national security state, including generals. His own politics were way to the right of his good friend Johnson’s — he even traveled to Nazi Germany several years before World War II and had a brief meeting with Hitler. When Byrd returned to the US after that encounter, he spoke positively of Hitler’s “sincerity” and “basically sound policies.” 

Among his vast web of business holdings, Byrd owned a building in downtown Dallas on a corner of Dealey Plaza, an intersection just before one enters a freeway. As an investment, the building had become a bit of a lemon, largely empty in the early 1960s. Within a year before Kennedy’s visit, though, a new tenant moved in, a firm called the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), which distributed books from national publishers to schools throughout the Southwest. 

As an investment, the building was far from being a lemon. But to understand that, you have to know how Byrd acquired it.

This is from my book, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War:

[i] The Handbook of Texas Online, Texas School Book Depository entry

[ii] Refrigeration Engineering 1937 volumes 33-34, p328

The owner of the TSBD, Jack Cason, leaned far right himself, and had his own military connections. He even headed up a Dallas post of the military adjunct American Legion, which was also closely tied to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the Cold War national obsession with investigating “subversives.” 

LOL. Looks like a lazy summary of a post I made in 2013 about Cason and the FBI American Legion Contact Program. I suspect I know why this piece on Byrd has an avoidance of citations save a few embedded links.

At some point in the year before the motorcade (the exact date has proven oddly difficult to nail down — even the Sixth Floor Museum, dedicated to the assassination and located in the building, told me they didn’t know), Cason relocated his operation from nearby to Byrd’s building, and became the primary tenant, so the building was renamed after Cason’s firm.  

Relocated “from nearby”? LOL. You could say that. They relocated from across the street in the Dal-Tex Building. Even Wikipedia got this right.

As for the timing of the move… none other than Roy Sansom Truly let slip that the move had occurred only a few months previous.

In October 1963, Lee Oswald applied for a job with Cason’s firm, and even though it was off-season for schoolbook purchases and the firm had laid off non-essential personnel, for some reason it found this unprepossessing applicant with a reputation as a left-wing dissident especially appealing and put him to work (according to an oral history interview with Cason’s widow), ostensibly laying flooring and filling the odd book order. 

Why believe her second-hand account – especially given it was by then decades old in her memory? She probably even forgot that she got drunk at a dinner party in 1961 and announced that someone should shoot Kennedy.

There was only one person laid off – and that may have had nothing to do with how busy it was or wasn’t.

What we do have is the testimony on this by Charles Givens and Bonnie Ray Williams.

So under normal circumstances, some workers would be stood down in the off-season and recalled when things picked up again. Except for this one occasion when the TSBD decided to show some heart and create work to justify keeping people on – and even hiring another temp due to the fact that the work of laying floors had apparently taken too many away from other work and now they need another general dogsbody.

But that is not even the best part. All of this generosity (causing additional labor costs) was done in the middle of an external review on efficiency!

As for the TSBD company itself, several former employees have described to me and others company activities, including the apparent covert shipment of things other than books in book cartons, that made clear to them the outfit had its own connections with the intelligence world. In addition, Elzie Glaze, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, researched and interviewed Bill Shelley, Oswald’s supervisor, and later noted, “Mr. Shelley claims to have been an intelligence officer during World War II and thereafter joined the CIA.”  

Cason and his company clearly deserve more scrutiny, but my focus here is on the more powerful Harold Byrd. 

The “several employees” are not named, and not directly quoted. Which brings into question, the reliability of this information. Sloppy does not begin to describe this – especially from someone who hangs his credibility on being an “investigative journalist”. I mean, he could have at least used pseudonyms if protecting them is the issue. I dunno. Maybe, one could be “Deep Scrote” and another could be “Madame Blowfly”. But whatever – direct quotes of the Q and A would have been the expectation.

I’m calling bullshit, regardless of sources – if there indeed were any.

And such bullshit undermines the real need for Cason and Byrd to be scrutinized. Which, if you have clicked the links along the way, you’ll note that this has been done – at least in a limited though targeted manner.

As for the claim by Shelley that he had been an intelligence officer during WWII and thereafter joined the CIA; I say this is a prime example of good ol’ boy Texas exaggeration.

He testified to the Warren Commission that he worked in a defense plant during the war and then joined the TSBD. Same scenario as his friend Roy Truly. He was even following in Roy’s shadow at the TSBD by taking over as Miscellaneous Dept Manager after Truly went to Superintendent. It looks very much like they worked in the same defense plant. So how does he get to call this being an “intelligence officer”? That’s the exaggeration. Defense plants were stacked with FBI and military informants. He and Roy were very likely in such roles. His claim of moving to the CIA after that is horseshit meant to impress the young cub reporter. The FBI however, between the Defense Plant informant program and the one involving the American Legion and Cason, undoubtedly kept an ongoing relationship with all three – Truly, Shelley and Cason. It is all explained here.

Any serious investigation into JFK’s assassination would have probed Oswald’s path to being in the building that day. That was a central mystery of the assassination. But the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Warren Commission, while going through the motions of scrutinizing how Oswald landed the job when he did, concluded it was all just an uncanny coincidence — that a guy with an inclination to assassinate (how many of those are there?) unwittingly got the perfect opportunity to do so. Which meant they failed to examine Byrd’s ownership of the building, which meant they failed to interview him and ask him whether he knew Oswald, whether he knew how Oswald had been hired, etc. And of course, they never asked Byrd where he was when he learned that his own building had harbored Kennedy’s killer. 

Luckily there are serious investigations. Here is how Oswald got his job. It comes from a gun, but unheralded researcher in Canada.

To this day, as I’ve said, Byrd has eluded scrutiny. 

But given the cataclysmic import of the events of November 22, 1963, it’s surely not too late to open that inquiry. Question No.1: Where was Byrd that day? Answer: We don’t really know. But I’ve unearthed some strong hints about where he wasn’t.  

Working with a ghost writer, Byrd later published a vanity autobiography, and although he makes some effort to enliven his life story with anecdotes that might interest general readers, nowhere does he mention November 22, his ownership of the TSBD building, or his presumed consternation on learning the building’s role in the crime of the century. In fact, about the JFK assassination he says precisely… nothing. 

To me, that’s passing strange. 

A show of contempt, perhaps?

Looking deeper into his whereabouts on and around that tragic day, here’s one thing I found: There is no evidence that he was in Dallas. We wouldn’t expect there to be, because he soon put the word out that he’d been away. But, on the other hand, what I also found that definitely roused my curiosity was an apparent effort by Byrd and associates to plant stories about him that pointed to his being thousands of miles away from Dallas at that time — on a hunting safari in Mozambique, a place he had never been to before. Why do that?

You are speculating and then writing as if the speculation is proven fact. It isn’t. He was on Safari in Mozambique.

And what was more curious still, the closer I looked into the tale of the safari, the more it seemed that Byrd, with a little help from his friends, had made up that whole story. For reasons that a JFK assassination investigator can only speculate about.

“JFK assassination investigator” – code for – anyone who can spin anything into a question and then speculate on possible answers to the question before weaving those now “proven” answers, into a Universal Conspiracy Modulator.

As my cockatoo says when he isn’t getting enough attention. “FOR FAWWWK SAKE!”

I’ll take you through the details of what I found, and you can decide for yourself if there’s a plausible benign explanation. 

Okay Alice. Let’s go through the looking glass.

But before we get into sniffing around the safari story, it’s worth noting that, in addition to being close to the man who became president when Kennedy was killed, and hosting the man who ostensibly killed Kennedy, Harold Byrd had a third distinction: He knew a CIA-connected intelligence operative named George de Mohrenschildt who had been asked by the CIA to “keep an eye” on Oswald a year before the assassination. 

Even the briefest summary of the connections between de Mohrenschildt, Byrd, and Oswald at this time risks sounding like a page from an overheated spy thriller.

Don’t be coy! That’s exactly the motif you’re aiming for!

In October 1962, shortly after Oswald abruptly moved to Dallas from Fort Worth, de Mohrenschildt, who had worked for Byrd years earlier, began helping Oswald and his wife get settled in their new home. At around the same time, de Mohrenschildt set up a charity board and put Byrd’s wife on it. 

Note that Byrd was co-founder and, for decades, a top leader of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), an Air Force auxiliary. I’ve found evidence that it was also used for covert operations, including a plan to send selected CAP recruits to the Army Counterintelligence School in Maryland to “be taught the Russian language, Russian military tactics, Russian politics and all characteristics of the Russian people.” Sounds a lot like defector training, doesn’t it? 

You found evidence about the CAP program? YOU found evidence??? This is another lazy summary of MY work – this time work that was published in my book in 2016. The CAP section was republished with permission at Kennedys and King and discussion with attribution on Bill Kelly’s blog.

The hypocrisy involved in purloining someone else’s labor and then publishing on your own website under the heading “reprint policy”:

is breathtaking: a pure act of bastardry. I have published your whole shoddy article. Please please fucking sue!

While Byrd was commander of the Texas and Louisiana region of the Civil Air Patrol (1948-53), an eccentric pilot named David Ferrie joined one of its Louisiana chapters, eventually becoming a squadron leader. It’s now known that Ferrie got deeply involved in a range of right-wing activity, including gun-running and working with anti-Castro Cubans. 

In 1955, Ferrie crossed paths at the Louisiana CAP with Lee Oswald, then a teenage New Orleans air cadet. As we know, some years later this same Oswald, having somehow taught himself Russian, and with a defection to the Soviet Union under his belt, ended up working in a Dallas building owned by Byrd. 

Here. Help yourself to more of my work. This time on how Oswald learned Russian. Knock yourself out.

With that as context-setting background, let’s return to the question of why Byrd might have gone to so much trouble to create the impression that he was in Africa hunting elephants on November 22, 1963. Well, for one thing, his ownership of the TSBD building might have shined an uncomfortable spotlight on his activities around the time of the assassination. 

Byrd didn’t go to any trouble and is not responsible for your errant epistemology.

Having owned this building for decades, and being hands-on, he knew the innards of the structure better than anyone else. This is important when you consider how all aspects of the building have been examined and reexamined over the years in an effort to nail down what actually happened when the president of the United States was gunned down in broad daylight on the street in front of the TSBD. 

One problem here, Einstein. When the TSBD moved in, it made major renovations, including adding stairs and an elevator among them. If you needed someone who knew the building as it was on November 22, look no further than Roy Sansom Truly.

Because Oswald, the sole suspect, was killed in police custody two days after the assassination — and so never had a chance to tell, in detail, exactly what he knew — the investigation into the murder revolved around physical evidence at the crime scene, with prime focus on Byrd’s building. 

Oswald was not killed because he knew anything. He was killed because there was no valid case against him. He told reporters all that he knew.

• He had not killed anyone

• He didn’t know what the situation was about. All he knew was that he was accused of killing a police officer

• He was a patsy

• He was taken in because he had lived in the Soviet Union

To reconstruct what happened, investigators had to consider such details as: the location of the passenger and freight elevators, and which elevator went up to which floors; the layout of the stairwells and other potential hiding places; the distances and times it would take for a shooter (or shooters) to fire their weapon(s), hide their guns, and descend, undetected, a number of floors so as to be seen standing, as Oswald was, on the second floor, calmly holding a soda, when spotted by other employees and a police officer in the building just moments after Kennedy was hit. 

1. Again, this is why your Byrd theory fails. The guts of the building had been dramatically altered by the current occupants. well, it is one reason why it fails. We will get to the others.

2. The Oswald-Truly-Baker encounter on the second floor never happened. Oswald said he bought the coke, took it down to the domino room to have with lunch, then went out to watch the parade before quickly heading back in, as he had stood in a spot at the back of the steps that afforded no vision of what was happening. It took a few minutes for those outside to realize the noises were not backfiring bikes, but gunshots that had found their mark. As soft moans turned to screams, Oswald again decided to go out. This time he was stopped by Det. Kaminski and Roy Truly who had been stationed at the door. Kaminski was checking ID and taking names and contact details. Truly was verifying that the person had legitimate business being in the building ( it was here that Truly uttered his immortal line – “He’s okay, he works here”). Before that though, Kaminski had asked Lee to stand aside while they set themselves up, ready to proceed. The 2nd floor encounter was relocated in time and place to make this go away. Except it didn’t. It only delayed the discoveries that show what really happened. Here for example, is the document showing that Kaminski and Truly were stationed at the front door.

If I were running a clandestine operation out of that building, I’d want Harold Byrd by my side offering intimate building details as I was dealing with the police radio, the movements of various law enforcement agencies into the building, and so on. 

I would certainly not want him far away, unreachable, in some steamy African savannah. (Indeed, Byrd’s purported trip came in the last weeks of the local hunting season, when the heat typically became oppressive; even the safari camp advertised that it closed as of December 1). 

Luckily you’re not running anything more than a website. As for going on safari in the last weeks of the season… best time to go. Crowds have thinned out by then.

But I also wouldn’t want him visible in Dallas, doing anything publicly. 

On the other hand, if I were Byrd and I were involved in something of this nature, the first thing I’d worry about is covering my own ass. In short, I’d need a good story, should anyone ask questions. 

Back in the days where there were no cell phones or other modern means of tracking someone away from “civilization,” what better story than being away on an African safari — especially for someone already known to be an avid hunter. 

Avid hunter goes on safari. You’re right. It sounds legit!

Shot by Byrd, Dec 7, 1963

It’s not as if there aren’t some pieces of evidence that Byrd was on safari in Africa for several weeks in late 1963. But on closer examination, this evidence is revealed to be… highly dubious. 

No, what is revealed as “dubious” is your analysis and your motive.

Consider photos posted to an online gallery by Christian von Alvensleben, a nephew of the owner of the safari camp, who worked there as a photographer. One shows a man that the photographer was told was “Byrd.” Von Alvensleben remembers him and a companion arriving in early November 1963 and staying over a month. (We cannot reproduce these safari photos on this page for copyright reasons. Sorry about that. But the links take you directly to the photos in question.)

Take a close look at “Byrd,” the man with a mustache smoking a cigar, and compare it with the ones below whom we consider the real Byrd. Notice especially the eyes. 

The same man is seen in a number of photos in the leopard hunt series. The nephew of the safari park owner is clearly misremembering, or the person was misidentified to him. But your theory is that in order to establish an alibi, Byrd hired the world’s worst impersonator to pretend to be him – and then instructed him to make sure he was photographed numerous times. Byrd was cunning. He thought to himself, in 60 years time, some sleuth is going to start questioning my alibi, so it will be prudent to have someone who does not look like me, impersonate me and have his photo taken on safari, That will fuck with the heads of these future sleuths for sure!

The article shows this photo of Byrd for comparison purposes

Which Baker labels “David Harold Byrd (date unknown). Photo credit: Unknown”

So… let me help you out yet again. The photo is a crop from a photo taken for Life magazine, published November 17, 1941. So even though you are correct – that the person identified as Byrd arriving for the safari, is not in fact him – you have been using a photo taken of Byrd 22 years prior for your own analysis.

Here is the full photo

I sent the photo of the mustachioed man to several people who knew Byrd. None of them thought it was he.

Also: The real Byrd was a proud hunter who, like most hunters, routinely posed for pictures next to his trophies. Yet in the online photo gallery we see a picture of a dead elephant lying on its side, with two Mozambican guides holding its ear aloft. 

On the ear is painted “Shot by Harold Byrd. Dec. 7 1963.”

And no Harold Byrd standing beside it. 

Yet the person misidentified as Byrd – and the only person going by that name you claim was there – is seen next to prey in other shots you fail to mention. Here is one example from the same series of photos. And though you claim the real Byrd always posed next to his kill, there is no evidence that he always did. So… your alleged Byrd doppelganger was indeed having his photo taken next to his kills. What the elephant photo you point to actually proves is that there was no doppelganger – and it was just another random hunter misidentified. In fact – shock horror – while the real Byrd, sometimes preferred just to have his kill used as a billboard for his own Baker-sized ego, he did have at least one photo taken with a kill – it appears to be from a trip made with General Doolittle in 1966.

What kind of hunter does that? Arguably, only one who’s keen to keep his face out of the picture while creating the impression that he, or rather the person being impersonated, was there. 

In fact, the purported Byrd was so keen to leave a false trail that, von Alvensleben tells us, throughout his visit the presumably false Byrd had a brush and a can of paint stowed in the Land Rover during his hunting sorties — apparently waiting for a chance to paint Byrd’s name on something big enough. 

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the guy who presented himself as Byrd, arriving at the hunting camp two or three weeks before the assassination, was an impostor. And who could have sent him except Byrd, or people acting on his behalf, to substantiate a story that Byrd was nowhere near Dallas in late November?

The only conclusion hard to avoid is that you need to loosen your tinfoil hat a bit.

The more safari photos you look at, the more doubts arise. The purported Byrd showed up with a companion, an American with a Southern accent who called himself Thomas May.  

However, a Dallas Morning News article on January 19, 1964, which mentioned Byrd’s hunting trip, said that his companion was Dr. Vanda Davidson, a leading Dallas gynecologist. But von Alvensleben, the photographer, reports no Davidson with Byrd. Period photos of Davidson show that he is not the same man as the “Thomas May” who appears in von Alvensleben’s photos.

Von Alvensleben (full Mozambique gallery here) recalls that May described himself as a former Marine colonel, now a schoolbook writer or editor. Extensive searches have found no historical record of someone with that name fitting that description. So it looks like both hunters were using false names.

Again, your sources have confused memories. May was a former Air Force Lt. Colonel, He was NOT from Dallas – nor a schoolbook writer. That seems to be a misapplied description of Byrd – who was from Dallas and an owner of a building where schoolbook publishers had offices.

Col. Thomas May was from Phoenix at that time and had been a full Colonel in the Arizona Wings Civil Air Patrol. He had never lived in Dallas. The CAP and aviation seem to be the common denominators with Byrd.

As for the Dallas Morning new story… what can I say… except Mr. Baker needs reading lessons. Nowhere does it say Byrd’s hunting companion was Dr. Vanda Davidson. It merely notes that both men are from Dallas.

There is nothing positive to be said about “JFK Assassination: 60 Years Later, Crucial Alibi Dismantled” by Russ Baker & friends. It is a testament to how much of the mainstream and alternative media works. Find a target audience and feed them what they crave.

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