Garrison Seeks Mystery Man

Jim Garrison is looking for the man whose photo appears on this page. Garrison thinks he may be one of the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy. [Web archive note: the photo does not appear in the original FE print edition.]

The photo, first published almost four years after the event in the September 15 Berkeley Barb, is a blow-up of part of a frame from a film which shows him seized by police and released.

An investigator into the JFK killing who is in touch with Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney pressing the conspiracy charges, said that the unidentified man was grabbed when he began shouting something in Spanish, at the time the doomed President passed.

In an interview in the current issue of Playboy magazine, Garrison gives an account of an incident which may be directly related to the filmed event.

Garrison refers to a man not involved in the shooting who created a diversionary action to draw attention away from the snipers. He says the man, in green combat fatigues, faked an epileptic fit, diverting people from the grassy knoll just before the Kennedy motorcade reached the ambush point.

The “grassy knoll” is the place from which most critics of the Warren Report think most of the shots were fired at Kennedy. The knoll is near the Book Depository building where the Warren Commission places Lee Oswald as a lone assassin.

Accounts of location and timing put the man in the photo and the man in green fatigues at or near the same place at the time of the fatal shots.

The photo published here is one of 224 frames, taken by 57 different photographers, studied in detail by Richard E. Sprague.

Sprague began tracking down ‘the photographic evidence after communicating with Harold Weisberg, author of “Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report,” and “Whitewash II: The FBI Secret Service Cover-up,”

The results of Sprague’s careful studies are discussed in Weisberg’s newly-published book on the assassination, “Photographic Whitewash: Suppressed Kennedy Assassination Pictures.”

According to Sprague, the Warren Commission used only 21 of the 224 photographs he studied. Nearly half of the photos, he said, were never examined by any official investigative body.

Sprague’s study of the photos were aimed at establishing a time sequence which, he says, reveals the motions of various persons in the area at the time of the ambush.

Charting these movements, Sprague says, provides “a trail for following each of the potential assassins.” His analysis shows five men on the grassy knoll apparently fleeing after the fatal shots.

Another sequence shows a man standing on the fire escape of the Dal-Tex building, across the street from the Book Depository building. The man, Sprague says, appears “startled by something nearby such as a possible loud noise coming from directly underneath him.”

Another photo, he says, also provides evidence of a shot from the second floor of the Dal-Tex building.

The Warren Commission places Oswald alone on the sixth floor of the Book Depository building.

Another photo shows that sixth floor window a moment before the assassination. No person or projection from the window is visible.

In his Playboy interview, the New Orleans D.A. also refers to one of the motion pictures studied by Sprague. D.A. Garrison says the film shows the Dallas police carrying the assassination weapon from the Book Depository building “approximately 20 minutes before Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano was ‘discovered’—or planted—on the premises.”

Garrison points out that the rifle first seized by the police is shown by the photos to have no telescopic sight, and so cannot be Oswald’s rifle.

Author Weisberg, in “Photographic Whitewash,” states, “When pictures were pressed upon it (The Warren Commission), it refused them. When leads were thrust upon it, it ignored them. And when it could no longer avoid the photographic evidence, it abused and misused it....

Both Weisberg and Sprague worked with CBS in its recent four-day marathon on the assassination. They offered CBS all the films uncovered in their investigations.

Weisberg told Barb that CBS totally ignored this photographic evidence, and said instead that there was no “new evidence” contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission.

From the Berkeley Barb