John Whitten: The CIA Official who Pursued the Truth of the JFK Assassination presented by Special Investigator Gary Revel

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January 19, 2014
Temple, TX USA
Update: March 20, 2017, Killeen, Texas
Re: JFK Assassination and the CIA

Seeing is Believing: the impact clearly shows the bullet did not come from behind but rather from right-front.

John Whitten: The CIA Official who Pursued the Truth of the JFK Assassination

Opinion/Historical Perspective by Gary Revel

Even in 1963 the CIA had it's own domestic operations within the US regardless of their legality. Much of it was centered in Miami, Florida and used some of the Cuban Exiles as contracted assets for covert operations. After the killing of JFK the CIA Director of Plans-Richard Helms, Counterintelligence Chief Jim Angleton and Special Operations Liason Richard Ober were ready to cover up any involvement of the CIA. Helms had contingency plans for the termination of a president who became a threat to the National Secutiry of the United States. One of those plans had been implemented by 'someone' and it had to be as if it the plan never existed.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was sidelined because of the loss of his brother so Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach stepped into the position of Acting Attorney General. He sent a memo to Bill Moyer, an Assistant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson that read.

"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he had no confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists."

Eventually the JFK Assassination Records Review board released several chapters from an unpublished memoir written by Win Scott, the man who had been serving as chief of the CIA’s Mexico City station in 1963. Scott, renowned among colleagues for his photographic memory, wrote that Oswald was the object of “keen interest” from the moment he arrived in Mexico City. It was only then that many learned of the lone CIA official who set out to get to the bottom of the entire matter. John Whitten. He had given a sworn deposition, being a retired CIA official known only as “John Scelso.” Scelso was a cover name for John Whitten, a former senior staffer in the Western Hemisphere division of the covert operations directorate.

John Whitten

Whitten’s identity was so sensitive that it was illegal to publish it until October 2002, when the CIA finally declassified his name. Because my investigation in 1977 was a covert operation and I was able to peruse files few have known about or seen I did have a little knowledge of Whitten even then. Of course I could say nothing, I would have been killed or at the very least sent to Federal Prison if I had even mentioned his name.

When people who say there’s nothing new to be learned about the Kennedy assassination they discount stories like that of John Whitten. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he fought for the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. He began working on embassy security and became a career CIA man. Brilliant and decisive, he rose in the government’s civil service earning the highest possible GS-17 ranking, and a reputation for cracking espionage puzzles. He won a medal for pioneering the use of the polygraph for the intelligence community. In November 1963, he was a trusted CIA official who was sure to follow the leading of Helms and the others that were sure to pin the JFK matter on Oswald.

He was appointed by Richard Helms to conduct an 'in house' investigation of the JFK assassination. His first conclusions toed the line with J. Edgar Hoover's lone gunman theory. Then he found lots of facts and evidence that the FBI had kept from him and his staff as well as information that even his boss, Richard Helms, had kept from him. At this point he wanted to continue the investigation and broaden it's scope. He went to Helms and argued his case.

Whitten argued that Oswald's pro-Castro political activities needed closer examination; his alleged attempt to shoot the right-wing General Edwin Walker, his involvement with anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, his public support for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Whitten pointed out that this new information changed his first conclusion and he needed more time to do a thourough investigation.

Whitten felt a need to learn more and to continue asking questions. Then on Christmas Eve 1963 deputy director CIA Richard Helms and counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton called Whitten in for a meeting and told him that it was over. He was to stop all investigative work into the assassination of JFK. It is clear to this investigator that both Helms, Ober and Angleton had much to hide related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy involving the FBI and CIA links with the Mafia.

Under oath, Whitten later described how he had pursued his investigation around the clock for a couple of weeks after the assassination. His testimony confirmed the unusual handling of pre-assassination information about Oswald. He had talked to Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, and found that Lee Harvey Oswald or a double had been photographed at the Cuban consulate in early October, 1963 and been at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. This was new to Whitten. It became clear to Whitten that he should have been informed about Oswald prior to the JFK Assassination and wasn't. Further the CIA had a pre-assassination 201 file on Oswald that had been maintained by the Counterintelligence/Special Investigative Group which had also been kept in the dark. Later I would learn that CIA-George Joannides was the case officer for the Student Revolutionary Directorate with which Lee Harvey Oswald had a number of contacts.

George Joannides

Joannides was the CIA liason in charge of the HSCA-House Select Committee on Assassination's efforts to get information from the CIA on the Martin Luther King Jr. case and the JFK case. His real purpose was to thwart any real effort from successfully bringing any truth to the entire matter of both assassinations. Everything I learned was especially in spite of his efforts to prevent me from learning anything true or new at all.

Whitten kept his distance from Helms after his experience with JFK case. He was bothered by Helms’s failure to give him files on Oswald’s Cuba-related activities. He was appalled to learn in the 1970s that Helms had been organizing a conspiracy to kill Castro in November 1963 and failed to share information about the plots with the Warren Commission. Helms’s actions were “completely morally reprehensible,” he said. Whitten was an insider who could recognize the subtleties of what was going on in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans at the time of Kennedy’s death.

Whitten had testified that, "Accounting for Oswald’s Cuba-related activities proved especially difficult". In early December 1963 Whitten was writing up what he had gleaned from CIA files, when he was invited to the White House for a look at the FBI’s preliminary report on Oswald. Reading the report, Whitten was shocked. The FBI had all sorts of information about Oswald that had never been given to him. Whitten went back to his office realizing that deputy director Dick Helms and counterintelligence chief James Angleton had been withholding “vital information” about the accused assassin from him.

He was asked about the Oswald related cable of October 10, 1963 and Whitten was puzzled that someone as senior as Tom Karamessines had signed off on it. Standard agency procedures involving reporting on Americans abroad, he said, did not normally require such high-level attention. In 1978, congressional investigators found him living in self-imposed exile and interviewed him in secret session.

When asked, "Could you give us some examples of that?” Whitten remembered quite clearly.

“Yes,” he said. “Details of Oswald’s political activity in the United States, the pro-Cuban activity…” Later on he reiterated the point: “Oswald’s involvement with the pro-Castro movement in the United States was not at all surfaced to us in the first weeks of the investigation,” he said. Why would Helms and Angleton not share such information his colleague in charge of the agency’s investigation of Oswald?

Whitten never found out. He testified that as soon as he learned he had been denied key files on Oswald, he complained to Helms around Christmastime 1963. His initial conclusion that Oswald had acted alone, he said, was “obviously, completely irrelevant in view of all this Bureau information.”

John Tunheim, the federal judge who served as chairman of the JFK review board, once said, “the so-called ‘Scelso deposition’ was perhaps the single most important documents we uncovered.”

Whitten, unfortunately, died in January 2000 in a Pennsylvania nursing home.

Patrick Wood brings the hidden details of the 1977 Gary Revel investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King JR. to light. He is writing and publishing "ZORRO: THE UNVEILING OF THE PLOT TO KILL MLK" in chapters in a way that brings to life the intimacy of Gary's dangerous quest of finding the truth and more. To begin your own personal journey Click Here to Read.

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Gary Revel found links to those responsible for the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, John Lennon and the attempted killing of President Ronald Reagan.

A VERY INTERESTING PHONE CONVERSATION
The lies and deceit in this phone conversation between 2 supposedly 'honorable men' are overwhelming. President Lyndon B. Johnson and FBI Director-J. Edgar Hoover conspire to keep the world in the dark as they have an ego pumping session shortly after JFK's killing. CLICK HERE To hear the entire, disturbing, and incredible private conversation. If the link doesn't work you can copy and paste this URL into your Web Browser address box. https://garyrevel.com/jfk/lbjjedgarhooverconspires.html

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