Creating Stories
Inspector Kelley and the difference between the “correct story” and the actual facts
From the Warren Commission testimony of Inspector Thomas Kelley of the Secret Service. Kelley was at the final Oswald interrogation.
I approached Oswald then and, out of the hearing of the others except perhaps one of Captain Fritz’s men, said that as a Secret Service agent, we are anxious to talk with him as soon as he had secured counsel; that we were responsible for the safety of the President; that the Dallas Police had charged him with the assassination of the President but that he had denied it; we were therefore very anxious to talk to him to make certain that the correct story was developing as it related to the assassination.
He wanted to make sure the correct story was developing in the face of Oswald’s denials.
The wording says it all. He does not say we want to make sure the police have their facts straight – no. Facts are adduced from the evidence and are merely the building blocks of “the story”. And the evidence so far was a shambles. From an innocent man’s perspective, there is only one story: his alibi. And no one wanted that. What Kelley wanted was to make sure the story being developed would hold up.
The story built by the police is everything, because it incorporates means, opportunity and where possible, motive. To create a patsy – which with the benefit of hindsight, was what they were trying to do, you have to start with a rudimentary story and try and fit whatever evidence you can around it, pad it out with created evidence and suborned testimony, and be prepared to be flexible insofar as needing to make change here and there for any number of reasons.
If you do need to change parts of the story, you simply continue on as if that had been the story all along.
The burying of initial accounts
The Warren Commission carried on in the same tradition. Time and again it ignored that the testimony being delivered was quite different to what the witness had originally said. Or in other words, it acted as if the testimony being given to them, had been the only version all along. It is no coincidence that the new improved stories were always on the inculpatory side of the ledger.
Here is a rare example of where the commission did go through previous statements of a witness – in this instance, with police sergeant Putnam who had been involved in the lethal transfer of Oswald.
Mr. HUBERT. In the line of command. Now, I have in my hand, two documents which I am going to mark–three documents which I am going to mark. Marking the first one as follows, to wit: “Dallas, Texas, March 24, 1964, Exhibit 5071. Deposition of J. A. Putnam,” and I am signing my name on that. The document is supposed to be a copy of a letter dated November 26, addressed by James A. Putnam to Chief of Police J. E. Curry, and it has two pages. I am placing my initials on the Second page. I am marking another document as follows, “Dallas, Texas, March 24th, 1964, Exhibit 5072. Deposition of J. A. Putnam.” I am signing my name on that page, the exhibit being a single page exhibit. Then I am marking a four-page exhibit being a report of an interview of you made on December the 3, by Special Agents Carris and Peden of the FBI. I am marking the first page in the bottom right hand, Dallas, Tens, March 24, 1964, Exhibit 5073. Deposition of J. A. Putnam.” I am signing my name on the first page below that, and putting my initials in the lower right-hand corner of the three subsequent pages on that exhibit. Have you had a chance to read these three documents that I have marked?
Those previous statements tended to exonerate police of any involvement in the murder of Oswald. Putnam unsurprisingly did not wish to make any changes.
Compare that to the questioning of motorcycle patrolman, Marion Baker. Baker told the story of how he and building superintendent Roy Truly encountered Oswald in the the 2nd floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository less than two minutes after the assassination. At no time during his testimony, was Baker asked to explain his original statement – taken on the afternoon of the assassination and made in the same small office in which Oswald was being held awaiting interrogation.
In that statement, Baker described the man he encountered as 30 years old (Oswald was 24), weighing 165 pounds (Oswald was under 140) and wearing a light brown jacket (Oswald wore a white t-shirt inside the building. He did wear a reddish-brown shirt over that to work, but only put it back on when leaving. In any case, if he had this shirt on in any encounter with Baker, he had been on the 1st floor where he kept it, not the 6th. Even the witness who claims to have seen Oswald straight after the alleged Baker-Truly-Oswald encounter said he was only wearing a white t-shirt. That is because she actually saw him earlier in the lunch break PRE-ASSASSINSATION when he in fact did go to the 2nd floor lunchroom for a coke to have with his sandwich – an almost daily ritual for Oswald and other laborers).
Captain Fritz and the Reid Technique
For police and prosecutors, the real jewel in the crown is the confession. Wringing out a confession means you don’t need much else.
Oswald might have survived a while longer if he had confessed. And false confessions are common. But Captain Fritz, the chief interrogator, famed for his ability to obtain confessions, had little hope of doing the same here. He had a suspect who seemed trained in how to handle interrogations, and a hall full of national and international media representatives who may not be as compliant, or as blind to methodology, as local news hounds.
In short, Most of his usual methods had to be shelved. He was left to cobble together a story convincing to the world, based on the very worst types of evidence – witness statements, physical evidence with broken chains of custody and junk science. To do the selling. he used local newspapers to conduct a trial by media, and by playing the communist card. Normally that would be more than sufficient to secure a conviction in Dallas. The Dallas police and DA rarely lost and were no strangers to sending innocent men to the electric chair.
Kelley knew about the creation of stories. The Secret Service, the Dallas police, and the FBI, all had training in the Reid Technique. This technique was developed after the Supreme Court had found confessions obtained by physical force were unconstitutional. Former FBI Special Agent John Reid developed a system to replace brute force with physical deprivation and psychological manipulation. Though without doubt, brutality, or sometimes just the threat of same, remained part of the arsenal within some jurisdictions.
Reading this part of his testimony, you could almost get the impression Kelley was guessing that the cart (the story) was being put before the horse (the evidence carrying the facts).
If that is what he thought, he was right. He was also happy to go along with it.
A microcosm
What happened with Oswald’s interrogations is just a microcosm of the world we live in. Real history is sometimes buried and replaced by a narrative that suits the ruling classes.
Yesterday in Australia gives us a classic example. Every 20 years, cabinet papers are released to the public. The latest release included details of Australia’s entry into the war against Iraq. It was based on a false narrative that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Our mission in Iraq was delineated as being the disarmament of such weapons. It took but a phone call from Bush to Prime Minister Howard to get us into the “coalition of the willing” or more aptly, “the coalition of countries willing to suspend disbelief” – or better yet – as Coleridge might have put it, “the coalition to adopt poetic faith”.
Australia went into that illegal war at the request of the US who thought having a smattering of international troops on the ground would somehow make the action look less criminal. And we entered it with undue haste, and despite the growing and vocal opposition in the community toward the war rhetoric.
It is good that the cabinet papers were released. There is only one problem. The facts about when Australia first knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction were not part of the release. It is looking increasing likely that such knowledge was available prior to the war commitment. That was certainly the case in both the US and UK.
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