Stranger than Holy Wood(y): JFK, E. Howard Hunt, Charles Harrelson and “Six to Eight” Tramps

DENVER Mar 21, 2007 (AP)— Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, died in the Supermax federal prison where he was serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, officials said Wednesday.

On March 15th, 2007, Charles Voyde Harrelson, the father of activist-actor Woody Harrelson, and the convicted contract-killer of federal judge John Wood in 1979, died of apparent heart failure in a Supermax prison in Denver. As Peter Levenda, author of Unholy Alliance and the three-volume Sinister Forces, points out, it took the press until March 21, 2007 to report on it–which might mean either that the press sat on the story or that prison officials took a rather bureaucratic pace in informing the media of the convict’s death. The timing is synchronous, as Levenda points out, because in the same week, the son of E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate plumber and CIA agent, told the press that, close to death, his father had admitted that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, orchestrated by “rogue” elements within the CIA.

Why should the latter fact correlate with Charles Harrelson’s death? You certainly wouldn’t know if you read the AP story about his demise. And if you checked the ABC news website you might have missed it, since, tellingly, the story is located in the “ABC News Entertainment” (a bit of redundancy there?) archives and the relevant connection between Woody’s dad and E. Howard Hunt gets only a passing mention–one sentence in the sixth paragraph:

He [Harrelson] claimed he had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and some reports assert the actor’s father was one of the tramps photographed on the “grassy knoll.” [There's an innacuracy in the ABC story here. The famous "tramps" were not photographed on the "grassy knoll." They were photographed being accompanied--oddly, given the day--sans handcuffs, by police officers through Dealey Plaza to the sheriff's office.]

E. Howard Hunt has also been alleged over the years to have been one of the “tramps” arrested shortly after JFK’s assassination.

E. Howard Hunt–Maybe a Tramp, Maybe an Insider

From the recent Rolling Stone article, wherein the ailing Hunt tells his son, Saint John, of his involvement in the JFK assassination:

One evening in Eureka, over a barbecue meal, St. John explains how he first came to suspect that his father might somehow be involved in the Kennedy assassination. “Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking — like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There’s nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it’s not him. He’s said it’s not him. But I’m his son, and I’ve got a gut feeling.”

In St. John’s narrative, his father goes on to scribble a diagram on a notepad, implicating a line of people starting: LBJ–Cord Meyer–Bill Harvey–David Morales –”French Gunman Grassy Knoll.” There’s something quite symbolic about the old spook revealing such things to his firstborn son. Afterall, it is another St. John who is credited with writing The Book of Revelations.

Officially, the three tramps have been identified, per debunkers and the FBI (so take that whatever way your reality tunnel dictates), as Harold Doyle, John Forrester Gedney, and Gus W. Abrams and the site of Prof. John McAdams even presents links to their arrest records on Nov. 22, 1963, plus an A Current Affair (the early 90’s tabloid-news show) report that broke the story in the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie, which given the lack of records for so long is a bit coincidental. Don’t call me crazy yet, o’ great debunker McAdams!–I said coincidental. But feel free to read into that:

Despite the arrest records and Doyle’s interview with A Current Affair, McAdam’s site also documents the following, from Volume 6 of the House Select Committee on Assassinations:

(660) Immediately after the assassination, law enforcement officers conducted a search of the area behind the grassy knoll in which several railroad boxcars were situated. As a result of this search, approximately six to eight persons who appeared to be derelicts were taken either to the nearby Dallas County Sheriff’s office, or to the Dallas Police Department for questioning. All were released without being booked, fingerprinted or photographed. (222) Among these “derelicts” were three men who, according to the arresting officers, had been found in a boxcar approximately one-half mile south of the assassination scene. (223) As the police led the three derelicts through Dealey Plaza to the sheriff’s office, they were photographed by several press photographers. (224)

“Six to eight” men arrested, but the police did not photograph, fingerprint or book any of them (though maybe that’s wrong, since Doyle recalls being fingerprinted–or should we suspect him of fabrication, Prof. McAdams?). Meanwhile, the press photos showing three of these six to eight men (you’d think the records would be a bit more precise than ballpark figures) were not published until 1974 and were first widely seen when Newsweek printed them in 1975. Doyle, Gedney and Abrams might have been tramps on that day, but so were three to five other guys, if there’s anything to the HSCA report. So who’re in the photos? And does it tell us anything at all?

Maybe.

At the time of the HSCA, quite a few folks were saying that one of those suspicious hoboes was none other than Hunt and another future Watergate plumber, Frank Sturgis. In addition to these two, “three other individuals, Thomas Vallee, Fred Lee Chrisman, and Daniel Carswell” were also suspected of being one of the tramps. But based upon the analysis of forensic anthropologists, the HSCA concluded that none of these men–not even Hunt– appear in the photos, despite apparent physical similarities.

The Hit Man Who May or May Not Have Killed Kennedy
But then there’s the case for Chauncey Holt, Charles Rogers, and…Charles Harrelson, made by Wim Dankbaar, a European JFK reseracher. Part of his identifications are based on analysis of forensic artist Lois Gibson, who’s video can be seen below:

Now, I’m no expert or trained eye, but when Gibson says the first tramp “definitely could be” Charles Rogers, that sounds a bit like the HSCA’s “six to eight” tramps. To my untrained eye, only two of her photos of Rogers seem to bear any resemblance to the tramp that Doyle claimed to be. In fact, Doyle does look more like the man in the “tramp” photos than Charles Rogers. However, I do agree that certain features of Doyle’s face–particularly the shape of his head and chin–do not match the man in the “tramp”photos at all.

Maybe Doyle had some work done?

On the other hand, the resemblance between photos of the tall tramp and Charles Harrelson, and the old tramp and Chauncey Holt appear much more convincing. Then again, I’m no forensic artist. So we have a question of experts. What stock one should put in the testimony of even the best forensic artist, versus that of unidentified forensic anthropologists and unidentified members of the FBI in the HSCA report, versus reporters for A Current Affair, I don’t know.

And what stock to put in CIA-man Chauncey Holt? (Try to avoid being swayed by the annoyingly dramatic music in this video and view it “objectively”–I dare you):

Holt, now dead, identified himself, Rogers and Harrelson as the three tramps, though Harrelson denied it. Interestingly enough, when Dallas morning news reporter Chuck Cook showed the “three tramps” photos to Harrelson’s wife, Jo Ann, she found the similarities between the “tall tramp” and her husband to be amazing.

And I suspect she probably got the same gut feeling that Saint John Hunt felt.

Cook, by the way, had been interviewing Harrelson about the Judge Wood case. (See the reserach at this link .) When arrested, the police had just concluded a standoff with Harrelson who, holding a .44 to his head and high on cocaine, admitted to not only killing Judge Wood but also JFK.

Was there something to that confession or do we just assume it’s the kind of thing someone high on cocaine, in the middle of a police standoff, would say? That’s exactly what another site postulates, saying that Harrelson’s JFK confession may have been his attempt at invalidating his admission-of-guilt in the Wood’s sniping, the first assassination of a federal judge in over a hundred years. When you’re high on cocaine and you realize you’ve just confessed to a political assassination, you might as well say you shot the president and pray they think you’re a crazy man who’s lying about both crimes.

Maybe.

Harrelson later denied shooting either Wood or Kennedy. However, while his claim of innocence with regards to the Wood case never wavered (he even convinced Woody), the same cannot be said about his JFK story. Reporter Cook (quoted in the article here; which sources Jim Marr’s excellent, if flawed, Crossfire) says that:

…[When he] interviewed Harrelson on the judge Wood case and subsequently asked him about his claims of murdering the President, …Harrelson ‘got this sly little grin on his face; Harrelson is very intelligent and has a way of not answering when it suits him. ‘

I wonder if that sly grin was anything like the one on the face of the tall man in the three tramps photo who Chauncey Holt fingered as Harrelson. And I wonder if that same tall man’s sly grin is one reason Jo Ann Harrelson found his resemblance to her husband so amazing.

At a subsequent interview, Cook states that Harrelson told him:

“Listen, if and when I get out of here (prison) and feel free to talk, I will have something that will be the biggest story you ever had…November 22, 1963. You remember that!”

One argument is that Harrelson simply used the JFK claim to garner a greater fee from potential clients before the hit on Judge Wood and that after his conviction, the story became his cynical, albeit ineffective, ploy to negotiate a reduced prison sentence.

Maybe.

Then again, imagine that you are serving two life sentences for the contract killing of a federal judge . Furthermore, imagine that you had previously served five years of a fifteen year sentence for another contract killing (businessman Sam Degalia) back in 1968. How much time off for good behavior might you expect for admitting involvement and/or direct guilt in the assassination of the president of the United States? And given your track record, why would you expect anyone to believe you?

That in itself is sort of a Catch-22, isn’t it. The very things that might make you a credible source of information in the greatest crime of the last century–a known history as a contract killer, and connections to underworld and intelligence operatives (don’t worry, we’re getting to that), also makes you utterly discreditable. Sounds kind of like a spook’s dilemma.

I bet E. Howard Hunt would have known a thing or two about that.

Killers and Spooks

Being a mob-connected contract killer isn’t all that different than being an intelligence operative. Both contract killers and spies have to make contacts with shady characters in order to perform their jobs and/or solicit business; they both have to, in turn, be shady characters themselves. Both have to get their hands dirty for their clients/employers. Both types of professionals also need to develop a knack for lies and subterfuge–creating plausible deniability or at least extreme uncertainty–regarding themselves and those they serve. And in the end, the contract killer and the spy can end up quite expendable and discreditable compared to those who provide the money in their bank accounts. And, in many cases, the difference between a contract-killer and an operative grows blurry and fades away: a distinction that is no distinction.

Look, we know hired killers/intelligence operatives know things, things hidden from us. We also know they lie. Sometimes they lie about the things they know. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they only want you to think they’re lying about the things they know. And sometimes they themselves are lied to by their paymasters. The seemingly insurmountable task for anyone looking into this stuff thus becomes how to separate the perceptual wheat from the chaff.

Charles Harrelson: As Spooky as Hunt?

Once you spend a few days researching possible JFK conspirators, you repeatedly come across little things that plunge you into the dark seas of uncertainty. (I can only imagine how the folks who’ve engaged in this for decades feel.) Intuition tells you something’s there, but you don’t always know what. That’s definitely the case when you investigate Charles Harrelson’s connections.

Take, for example, Percy Foreman, the attorney who represented James Earl Ray, Jack Ruby and then, during the Woods murder trial, Charles Harrelson. Or there’s the business card Harrelson had on him when arrested for the Wood’s hit–that of Russell D. Mathews, an associate of Jack Ruby. Matthews, according to Michael T. Griffith, citing the HSCA, had reputed mob ties in Dallas; and according to one source, one of those ties was to Dallas mobster Joseph Campisini, who not only dined with Jack Ruby the night before Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, but also went on to testify for Harrelson at his trial. Then there’s the matter of the man who purportedly hired Harrelson to kill Judge Wood, Joe Chagra, a known mobster himself. At trial, he stated that the claims of involvement with the JFK assassination partially led him to hire Harrelson for the Wood’s hit.

But we’re just dipping toes in the murk. It gets more interesting.

There’s this special report filed in the Midland Reporter-Examiner by historian W. Bear Mills on March 24th with the provocative headline:

Former Midlander convicted of two murders for hire dies in prison

That’s right. The headline is referring to Charles Harrelson:

Harrelson lived in Midland from 1961, the year his son, actor Woody Harrelson, was born, through 1967. City directories report Harrelson resided on Crestview, two blocks from Wall Street, and worked as a denture repairman at Tri-State Dental Supply.

Harrelson’s residence in Midland, Texas during that period should ring some alarms for those who recall the Bush family ties to the town. In fact, Midland was the site where George H.W. Bush, along with business partners John Overby, Hugh and Bill Liedke and once and future CIA employee Thomas J. Devine, founded Zapata Oil in 1953. During the time Harrelson lived in Midland, Bush was in Houston. There are more strange connections between the two men, however.

Continuing with Mills’ piece in the Midland Reporter-Examiner:

However, numerous federal and private investigations indicate Harrelson spent a great deal of that time on the road, working to secure a job as a gun for hire. His first would-be employer was the U.S. government, which was seeking mercenaries for the $13 million paramilitary operation known as Operation Mongoose that unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Arrest records, hotel receipts and employment applications indicate Harrelson was in California and Florida on the same dates many of the Operation Mongoose meetings were conducted by U.S. operatives. The Operation Mongoose data, much of which is stored in the National Archives and was made public in 1997, tracks events that led up to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961.

Harrelson was passed over as a candidate to execute Castro. However, he hinted to at least two reporters he was involved in another famous killing: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“Six to Eight” Degrees of George Bush, Sr.: The Strange Attractor

George H. W. Bush also has links to both the Bay of Pigs and the JFK murder.

The story first broke in an article written by Joseph McBride in the July 16-23, 1988 issue of The Nation. Buried among “98,755 pages of FBI documents ” released between 1977-1978 due to Freedom of Information Act requests, McBride found a memo sent by J. Edgar Hoover to the State Department the week after the Kennedy assassination that mentions Bush:

[It] is subject headed “Assassination of John F. Kennedy November 22, 1963.” In it, Hoover reports that the bureau had briefed “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” shortly after the assassination on the reaction of Cuban exiles in Miami. A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.

You can find the text of Hoover’s memo, which also indicates that Bush and a “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency” were briefed the day after JFK’s death, in Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin’s Unauthorized Biography of George Bush online.

(And you can find the affidavit of the other George Bush, a low-level CIA researcher, who the former U.S. president’s spokesperson initially tried to link to Hoover’s memo here.)

Prepare to get even dizzier. Because on the day of JFK’s assassination, G.H.W. made a phone call, ostensibly from Tyler, Texas, telling FBI agent Graham Kitchel of hearing talk in the last several weeks about one “James Parrott” plotting to kill Kennedy when he visited Houston. But that’s not all. There is also a suspected photo of Bush in Dallas, right in front of the Texas Bookstore Depository, on November 22, 1963.

As for the Bay of Pigs, a suggestive connection to Bush from the Tarpley and Chaitkin’s book:

Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and there around the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: “So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not.” 5 But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt’s Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer, were of course “deep-sixed” by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been “Don Eduardo,” roughly the Spanish equivalent of “Mr. Edward” or perhaps “Mr. Ed.” 6 According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan’s promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961. 7 Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with Zapata Offshore?

(You can find other suggestive leads regarding Bush, Bay of Pigs and Operation Zapata at the wikipedia page for the Zapata Corporation.)

So we now have links to the Bay of Pigs and JFK assassination for Charles Harrelson, E. Howard Hunt and George H. W. Bush. And we also have photos taken in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 that may or may not be of those same men. If there’s anything to W. Bear Mill’s Midland article, Harrelson’s Kennedy assassination cocaine-confession sounds more and more believable. Though–and maybe it’s just sleep deprivation talking–the name “W. Bear Mills” sounds increasingly like some sort of symbolic pen-name the more I look at it…

So where does that leave us? Given all we’ve learned since then about MK Ultra, Operation FUBELT- which operation led to the CIA-backed coup that toppled Salvador Allende and installed the fascist dictatorship of Pinochet (for those who don’t know, that was the original 9/11–9/11/1973), the Church Committee, revelations about Project Northwoods and on and on and on–I feel it’s either incredibly naive, cowardly or self-serving for anyone in this day to advocate the “lone nut” theory about the JFK murder or to disbelieve involvement by some players within the intelligence community. Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations, contrary to the Warren Commission, acknowledged a probable conspiracy. However, that the CIA liasson to the HSCA, George Joannides, participated in the same anti-Castro CIA front group, DRE, as Oswald in the month’s leading up to the JFK murder–a fact not known to HSCA at the time–may have ensured that no suspected conspirators would be indentified in the “probable conspiracy.”

Like I said earlier, it all gets quite murky down here in the depths. Nevertheless, it seems a safe assumption to me that attempting to pin anything on anyone based soley on old photos of so-called “tramps” could be a distraction. Photos can lie. But then, so too, can contract-killers and spooks, ex-Presidents included. And, as sage thinkers like Wittgenstein and Robert Anton Wilson have pointed out, the rest of us can lie, sometimes even unbeknownst to ourselves, due to the maps of “reality” in our heads. That includes those who perceive through the accepted, mainstream filters, the debunkers, and also their perceptual- rivals in conspiracy research camps. We don’t live in an “objective” world, not insofar as all but the enlightened sages perceive it (and they perceive it as poetry–the last thing most of us want to take as evidence of anything).

Do I really believe that?

Maybe.

But I do believe this for sure: Saint John Hunt and Woody Harrelson have a lot to talk about–and so do we.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• The Stranger Than Holy Wood(y) Postscript: That Ol’ Downardian Magic
• Charles Harrelson identified as one of the three tramps in Dallas
• E. Howard Hunt and the JFK Assassination
• JFK