2 Jesse Ventura has written a book.
3 He not only wrote a book, it is a JFK book, during this fiftieth anniversary week of the assassination.
4 The book is entitled They Killed Our President.
5 He claims to have some explosive new things to reveal.
6 We'll see. For the record, the guy interviewing him is Alex Jones, of Info Wars fame. You be the judge.
7 The trouble with a guy like Ventura is that he will take people at face value if they have a story to tell and can tell it.
8 It's fun, but almost impossible to move past the credibility gap with Jesse in some instances. Even if what he is saying is true, he still has an image to overcome. Over-eagerness often overcomes and overwhelms people researching these things, especially those seeking fame. This works to the advantage of the very people they try to expose. Free tix to the circus. Get in line behind the Enquirer, the Weekly World News, and Julian Assange.
9 For one thing he hops on this website called Info Wars, which edges pretty close on a LOT of stuff, but which also features some odd videos and things that mainstream people can shrug off. "Those conspiracy theorists! Come on!" Creepy poorly-done Illuminati pieces crop up on that website. Here's the challenge: that stuff is as cheap as a Russian trinket, and VERY easy for people to blow off.
10 I decided to go with the Ventura interview last night. In fact, much of today's DN was actually written while I listened to Jesse Ventura.
11 He begins with a self-proclaimed lover of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her name: Judyth Vary Baker, a gal whose You Tube video I happened upon last week. Jesse got to meet up and talk with her.
12 I questioned a whole lot of the story. It sounded almost like the story of a lonely woman who invented a life based on being a rabid JFK assassination groupie.
13 Don't get me wrong: her story is a GREAT story, especially if it's true. Right now I am my usual skeptical self.
14 Today I include a blog by a "researcher" named Stuart Bramhall, a story which seems to have made it to James Fetzer's blog. Fetzer is a rising "conspiracy" star because he lays out the entire assassination, including names and locations of each shooter. Bramhall's blog even has the support of the controversial Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire, one of the definitive JFK source books, or at least was.
15 My trouble with Marrs is that he has moved WAY ahead of anything I'm willing to accept as truth, including a connection he claims to have made between JFK and space aliens.
16 I also have a bit of trouble with Bramhall, who refers to Oswald's involvement in the "Fair Trade for Cuba" committee, as well as the misspelling of Guy Banister's name. (It was the Fair Play for Cuba, and Banister has just one "n" in it.) Bramhall does do a pretty good job of telling Baker's story.
17 So I include Bramhall's summary of Baker's book here because even if it's fake, it still shows that the Baker's story would make an awesome movie, which is what I suspect might have been her game in the first place.
18 She also shows some Mengelean human experimentation moments in Baker's love story. These moments are disturbingly horrifying.
19 The entire story is quirky and odd, and yet if true, it rings sweetly when she and Oswald are forced to separate for the last time. Their touching farewell is rivaled only by that of Ric and Ilsa.
20 Sidebar: I just listened to a little more of Ventura. He says that Baker told her that Oswald and Ruby knew each other as kids.
21 This stuff is right out of Peanuts.
22 Naturally, a name like "Jack Ruby" is way too gangsta for a neighborhood kid, so she claims his name as a kid was Sparky Rubenstein. Sparky and Lee. Me and Lee. It's almost as cute as Julie and Julia.
23 Evidently he shortened it to Jack Ruby right after he kissed his first bimbo.
24 AnywayZ...
25 Here's that blog. It really is a terrific story, I'm tellin' ya. You read this, and I'll listen to more Jesse. Remember, this was written last night. I sort of like the odd way it looks all scrap-booky, like someone was cutting one article out and placing it on someone else's blog. Oh wait. Uh. Nvm. Here go:
Judyth Vary Baker, Oswald's Bitch
THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2012
ME & LEE Reviewed by Stuart Bramhall
Me & Lee: How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald
Judyth Vary Baker (2010 TrineDay)
"They thought they could frighten Judyth Vary Baker into silence. And for decades they succeeded. But it’s too late to shut her up now. She’s already blown the whistle! And she did it for her friend Lee Oswald. Judyth’s story is a dark odyssey of disease, murder and betrayal, but it is one laced with innocence, hope and love." —Edward T. Haslam
Review by Stuart Bramhall
Me & Lee is a memoir by the only surviving member of a top secret New Orleans research team (also described at length in Ed Haslam’s 2007 Dr. Mary’s Monkey – which I have also reviewed) which attempted, in 1963, to develop a biologic warfare agent to assassinate Castro. Baker’s memoir has a forward by Haslam (see * below) and an afterward by longtime assassination researcher Jim Marrs. It’s also extensively footnoted and cross referenced with photos, news clippings and other documents from Baker’s personal records, Warren Commission testimony, and other records from the JFK archives.
A science prodigy, Judyth Vary Baker was only nineteen when she joined this project. The major strength of Lee & Me is the author’s ability to capture the naive idealism behind Baker’s determination to “conquer” cancer. As much a character study as an expose, the book portrays to perfection the blind, headstrong idealism typical of many young people manipulated into joining off-the-books intelligence-security activities.
Baker’s High School Cancer Research
It was obvious from an early age that Baker had a brilliant mind. Thanks to her extreme precociousness and heavy government emphasis on science education (to “catch up” with the Soviet space program), her high school provided her special premises to convert a science fair project into a long term study of techniques to accelerate cancer growth in mice. Thanks to Florida Senator George Smathers, she came to the attention of national cancer researchers. This led to her recruitment, after one year of college, by the prominent anti-Castro, anti-communist Dr. Alton Ochsner of Tulane University. Baker’s role was to assist cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman in a project that was sold to Baker as an effort to develop a vaccine against SV-40. The latter was a monkey virus which contaminated the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines given to children between 1955 and 1963.
Baker arrives in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 and discovers that she will be conducting research in CIA pilot David Ferrie’s apartment, rather Dr. Sherman’s lab. Moreover her assignment isn’t to work on a vaccine, but to help create a virus capable of causing “galloping” cancer. Her job consists of harvesting fifty or more mice every week that have been injected with SV-40 viruses mutated by exposure to radiation. She then grinds up the most aggressive tumors, suspends them in calf serum medium and centrifuges them to extract the viruses. She then transports them to Dr. Sherman’s lab to be re-exposed to high intensity radiation.
Baker’s Relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald
Baker unexpectedly meets Lee Harvey Oswald during this period, who will serve as her escort, riding the bus with her to and from work. In addition to her lab research, Ochsner asks her to take a cover job at the Reily Coffee Company, where her immediate boss is a former FBI agent, who is also heavily involved with the anti-Castro movement. Oswald also seems to be instrumental in persuading Baker to overcome her scruples about her biological warfare research, by revealing there is a right-wing/Mob/CIA/anti-Castro Cuban plot to kill JFK that might be derailed if they succeed in removing Castro from power. The line Oswald, Ferrie and Sherman give her that if Castro is assassinated, the different factions will start jockeying for power over Cuba and this will split the coalition.
Baker’s cover at Reily Coffee Company is that of secretary, though her main role is to ensure that Oswald, who also has a cover job at Reilly’s, gets his time card clocked in and out when he’s in the field. Both spend most of their time at their top secret jobs. Baker, who is mainly at Ferrie’s apartment dissecting mice, is never totally clear what Oswald’s assignment is. She describes him as getting regular payments from the FBI and CIA, as well as unemployment checks from a former job in Texas. He seems to be a kind of errand boy, both for the CIA and the Mafia. Oswald has relatives with the Mob and introduces Baker to New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. The Mafia has lost lucrative Cuban casinos in the revolution and is an eager participant in various conspiracies to get rid of Castro. Oswald also introduces her to Jacob “Sparky” Rubenstein (also known as "Jack Ruby"), whom Oswald has known from childhood.
Inside the Head of Lee Harvey Oswald
I have been reading JFK assassination literature since 1990. Of all the books I have read, Lee & Me provides the most insight into Oswald’s personality and his knowledge of the assassination conspiracy. As Baker portrays him, he comes across as an immature, bookish geek who liked to check out James Bond spy thrillers and quote from obscure literary works. He admitted to Baker that he was ashamed of hitting his wife Marina (for insulting his manhood) but seemed unable to stop. He also had strong personal views about civil rights and routinely sat in the rear, the colored section of buses. In 1963, the South was still militantly segregated. I can see how this might have been extremely irritating to his right wing, racist superiors.
Oswald’s CIA role in New Orleans
According to Baker, he was very much aware that his CIA handlers didn’t trust him following his return from the Soviet Union. He told Baker that fake defectors were never fully trusted, owing to the possibility they might have became double agents. Oswald was never given the name of the CIA officer running the anti-Castro project he was working for. Oswald only knew him as Mr. B and that he was CIA station chief in Mexico. According to Oswald, this pattern of being assigned a number of minor, unrelated tasks without being clear who he was working for was typical for agents suspected of being “dangles” (double agents). Baker states he only learned his superior’s real name a few days before the assassination. In their last phone conversation, Oswald revealed the man’s name was David Atlee Phillips. In 1963 Phillips was CIA Chief of Cuban Operations. In 1954 he played a major role in the CIA coup against Arbenz in Guatemala.
Baker mentions that Oswald helped to organize a shipment of weapons smuggled into New Orleans for the anti-Castro Cubans the CIA was training as paramilitaries. She also talks about an assignment in which Oswald posed as a pro-Castro member of Fair Trade for Cuba to collect names of Castro sympathizers to turn over to the FBI. He was also identified as the agent who would smuggle the fatal viruses into Cuba. This meant that Baker had to train him to change the culture medium necessary to keep them alive.
Baker is Fired from the Project
Eventually Sherman, Ferrie and Baker succeed in isolating a tumor virus capable of producing “galloping” cancer (killing them in weeks, rather than months) in mice. They then inject it into marmoset, rhesus and African green monkeys, where it proves to be equally virulent. In August 1963, Clay Shaw (the CIA contractor district attorney Jim Garrison prosecuted in 1967 for his involvement in the JFK assassination), Oswald and Ferrie transport the virus to the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, to inject it into a “volunteer” from the Angola Penitentiary. Baker is initially told the patient already suffers from terminal cancer. She subsequently learns that he’s perfectly healthy. It also becomes clear from the blood samples she’s asked to analyze for cancer cells that numerous volunteers have been injected with the lethal virus.
Baker writes an angry memo informing Ochsner that this type of experimentation on human subjects is unethical. He immediately terminates her from the project and threatens her life if she has any further contact with Oswald. By this point the two of them have become lovers. Although Baker returns to Florida with her husband, she and Oswald make plans to leave their respective spouses and elope to Mexico after Oswald smuggles the fatal virus into Cuba.
Oswald Realizes He is Being Set Up
Oswald, meanwhile learns that his assignment is changed, that he is only to transport the virus to Mexico City and hand it off to a second courier. When his contact fails to show in Mexico City, he makes a desperate attempt to get a Cuban visa to deliver the virus himself, which is denied. He is now genuinely concerned about his own safety. The information he possesses makes him a clear liability to the people he works for unless they have a specific use for him. He becomes convinced, at this point, that they are trying to set him up to look like a pro-Castro agent in the plot against JFK.
Despite the promise he has been given to be transferred to Mexico City, his superiors order him to return to Dallas to spy on “right wing nuts” interested in killing Kennedy. He and Baker continue to maintain phone contact, using pay phones and a complex phone wheel they use to synchronize call scheduling. On October 19th, Oswald is invited to join the assassination conspiracy – planned for three alternative locations – Miami (a right-wing informant blows the whistle on the Miami plot and Kennedy forgoes a motorcade to be transported by helicopter), Chicago and Dallas. Oswald plays along, believing he can pass details of the conspiracy to trusted FBI agents who can foil the assassination attempts.
Following the records release under the 1992 JFK Act, it was learned that a tip-off regarding an assassination threat caused the secret service to cancel JFK’s November 2nd visit to Chicago. Oswald told Baker back in 1963 that he was responsible for this tip off. On November 16, he told her that he also passed information regarding the Dallas assassination plot to an FBI contact. Oswald’s wife Marina later confirmed this in a letter to the Chairman of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. According to an FBI clerk Garrison interviewed during his investigation, the FBI contact telexed the information to the Dallas FBI field office, where it mysteriously vanished.
Validating Baker's Story
Edward Haslam, author of Dr. Mary’s Monkey, has exhaustively investigated her story and defends her for the following reasons:
1. He has confirmed her identity and her claims about doing cancer research in high school through the microfilm file at The Bradenton Herald, while employed there managing their market research.
2. He has sighted the W2 slip she provides for her period of employment at the Reily Coffee Company and confirms that they are genuine.
3. He has personally interviewed Anna Lewis, wife of CIA agent David Lewis, who worked with Oswald, Jack Martin and Guy Bannister in New Orleans’ anti-Castro movement. She confirms that Baker and Oswald were romantically involved in 1963.
I found this book quite convincing and very well documented. It was affecting to read of Judyth's horror at seeing the man she loved shot down by another man she had met in New Orleans. Research by experts on the assassination have established that Lee was framed and that the efforts to implicate him to the exclusion of other parties were based upon fabricated evidence, including the so-called "back yard" photographs. It is clear that justice has not been done to Lee, Judyth, or the American people.
* To protect her five children, Baker kept silent about her involvement with Oswald until her last child left home in 1998, she broke her silence. Her revelations on the Internet provoked a firestorm of controversy, both from pro-conspiracy researchers and Warren Commission diehards, who accuse her of fabricating her story from the wealth of detail on the JFK assassination circulating on the Internet.
Judyth Vary Baker maintains a blog athttp://judythbaker.blogspot.com/ And fifteen interviews with her can be found on-line at JamesFetzerNews.
Stuart Bramhall is a prolific author and journalist, who maintains several web sites, including "The Most Revolutionary Act". She currently resides in New Zealand and has also been interviewed twice by Jim Fetzer on "The Real Deal", on 7 February 2001 and on 10 August 2011.
Judyth Vary Baker (2010 TrineDay)
Review by Stuart Bramhall
Me & Lee is a memoir by the only surviving member of a top secret New Orleans research team (also described at length in Ed Haslam’s 2007 Dr. Mary’s Monkey – which I have also reviewed) which attempted, in 1963, to develop a biologic warfare agent to assassinate Castro. Baker’s memoir has a forward by Haslam (see * below) and an afterward by longtime assassination researcher Jim Marrs. It’s also extensively footnoted and cross referenced with photos, news clippings and other documents from Baker’s personal records, Warren Commission testimony, and other records from the JFK archives.
A science prodigy, Judyth Vary Baker was only nineteen when she joined this project. The major strength of Lee & Me is the author’s ability to capture the naive idealism behind Baker’s determination to “conquer” cancer. As much a character study as an expose, the book portrays to perfection the blind, headstrong idealism typical of many young people manipulated into joining off-the-books intelligence-security activities.
Baker’s High School Cancer Research
It was obvious from an early age that Baker had a brilliant mind. Thanks to her extreme precociousness and heavy government emphasis on science education (to “catch up” with the Soviet space program), her high school provided her special premises to convert a science fair project into a long term study of techniques to accelerate cancer growth in mice. Thanks to Florida Senator George Smathers, she came to the attention of national cancer researchers. This led to her recruitment, after one year of college, by the prominent anti-Castro, anti-communist Dr. Alton Ochsner of Tulane University. Baker’s role was to assist cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman in a project that was sold to Baker as an effort to develop a vaccine against SV-40. The latter was a monkey virus which contaminated the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines given to children between 1955 and 1963.
Baker’s Relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald
Baker unexpectedly meets Lee Harvey Oswald during this period, who will serve as her escort, riding the bus with her to and from work. In addition to her lab research, Ochsner asks her to take a cover job at the Reily Coffee Company, where her immediate boss is a former FBI agent, who is also heavily involved with the anti-Castro movement. Oswald also seems to be instrumental in persuading Baker to overcome her scruples about her biological warfare research, by revealing there is a right-wing/Mob/CIA/anti-Castro Cuban plot to kill JFK that might be derailed if they succeed in removing Castro from power. The line Oswald, Ferrie and Sherman give her that if Castro is assassinated, the different factions will start jockeying for power over Cuba and this will split the coalition.
Baker’s cover at Reily Coffee Company is that of secretary, though her main role is to ensure that Oswald, who also has a cover job at Reilly’s, gets his time card clocked in and out when he’s in the field. Both spend most of their time at their top secret jobs. Baker, who is mainly at Ferrie’s apartment dissecting mice, is never totally clear what Oswald’s assignment is. She describes him as getting regular payments from the FBI and CIA, as well as unemployment checks from a former job in Texas. He seems to be a kind of errand boy, both for the CIA and the Mafia. Oswald has relatives with the Mob and introduces Baker to New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. The Mafia has lost lucrative Cuban casinos in the revolution and is an eager participant in various conspiracies to get rid of Castro. Oswald also introduces her to Jacob “Sparky” Rubenstein (also known as "Jack Ruby"), whom Oswald has known from childhood.
Inside the Head of Lee Harvey Oswald
I have been reading JFK assassination literature since 1990. Of all the books I have read, Lee & Me provides the most insight into Oswald’s personality and his knowledge of the assassination conspiracy. As Baker portrays him, he comes across as an immature, bookish geek who liked to check out James Bond spy thrillers and quote from obscure literary works. He admitted to Baker that he was ashamed of hitting his wife Marina (for insulting his manhood) but seemed unable to stop. He also had strong personal views about civil rights and routinely sat in the rear, the colored section of buses. In 1963, the South was still militantly segregated. I can see how this might have been extremely irritating to his right wing, racist superiors.
Oswald’s CIA role in New Orleans
According to Baker, he was very much aware that his CIA handlers didn’t trust him following his return from the Soviet Union. He told Baker that fake defectors were never fully trusted, owing to the possibility they might have became double agents. Oswald was never given the name of the CIA officer running the anti-Castro project he was working for. Oswald only knew him as Mr. B and that he was CIA station chief in Mexico. According to Oswald, this pattern of being assigned a number of minor, unrelated tasks without being clear who he was working for was typical for agents suspected of being “dangles” (double agents). Baker states he only learned his superior’s real name a few days before the assassination. In their last phone conversation, Oswald revealed the man’s name was David Atlee Phillips. In 1963 Phillips was CIA Chief of Cuban Operations. In 1954 he played a major role in the CIA coup against Arbenz in Guatemala.
Baker is Fired from the Project
Eventually Sherman, Ferrie and Baker succeed in isolating a tumor virus capable of producing “galloping” cancer (killing them in weeks, rather than months) in mice. They then inject it into marmoset, rhesus and African green monkeys, where it proves to be equally virulent. In August 1963, Clay Shaw (the CIA contractor district attorney Jim Garrison prosecuted in 1967 for his involvement in the JFK assassination), Oswald and Ferrie transport the virus to the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, to inject it into a “volunteer” from the Angola Penitentiary. Baker is initially told the patient already suffers from terminal cancer. She subsequently learns that he’s perfectly healthy. It also becomes clear from the blood samples she’s asked to analyze for cancer cells that numerous volunteers have been injected with the lethal virus.
Baker writes an angry memo informing Ochsner that this type of experimentation on human subjects is unethical. He immediately terminates her from the project and threatens her life if she has any further contact with Oswald. By this point the two of them have become lovers. Although Baker returns to Florida with her husband, she and Oswald make plans to leave their respective spouses and elope to Mexico after Oswald smuggles the fatal virus into Cuba.
Oswald Realizes He is Being Set Up
Oswald, meanwhile learns that his assignment is changed, that he is only to transport the virus to Mexico City and hand it off to a second courier. When his contact fails to show in Mexico City, he makes a desperate attempt to get a Cuban visa to deliver the virus himself, which is denied. He is now genuinely concerned about his own safety. The information he possesses makes him a clear liability to the people he works for unless they have a specific use for him. He becomes convinced, at this point, that they are trying to set him up to look like a pro-Castro agent in the plot against JFK.
Following the records release under the 1992 JFK Act, it was learned that a tip-off regarding an assassination threat caused the secret service to cancel JFK’s November 2nd visit to Chicago. Oswald told Baker back in 1963 that he was responsible for this tip off. On November 16, he told her that he also passed information regarding the Dallas assassination plot to an FBI contact. Oswald’s wife Marina later confirmed this in a letter to the Chairman of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. According to an FBI clerk Garrison interviewed during his investigation, the FBI contact telexed the information to the Dallas FBI field office, where it mysteriously vanished.
Validating Baker's Story
Edward Haslam, author of Dr. Mary’s Monkey, has exhaustively investigated her story and defends her for the following reasons:
1. He has confirmed her identity and her claims about doing cancer research in high school through the microfilm file at The Bradenton Herald, while employed there managing their market research.
2. He has sighted the W2 slip she provides for her period of employment at the Reily Coffee Company and confirms that they are genuine.
3. He has personally interviewed Anna Lewis, wife of CIA agent David Lewis, who worked with Oswald, Jack Martin and Guy Bannister in New Orleans’ anti-Castro movement. She confirms that Baker and Oswald were romantically involved in 1963.
I found this book quite convincing and very well documented. It was affecting to read of Judyth's horror at seeing the man she loved shot down by another man she had met in New Orleans. Research by experts on the assassination have established that Lee was framed and that the efforts to implicate him to the exclusion of other parties were based upon fabricated evidence, including the so-called "back yard" photographs. It is clear that justice has not been done to Lee, Judyth, or the American people.
* To protect her five children, Baker kept silent about her involvement with Oswald until her last child left home in 1998, she broke her silence. Her revelations on the Internet provoked a firestorm of controversy, both from pro-conspiracy researchers and Warren Commission diehards, who accuse her of fabricating her story from the wealth of detail on the JFK assassination circulating on the Internet.
Judyth Vary Baker maintains a blog athttp://judythbaker.blogspot.com/ And fifteen interviews with her can be found on-line at JamesFetzerNews.
Stuart Bramhall is a prolific author and journalist, who maintains several web sites, including "The Most Revolutionary Act". She currently resides in New Zealand and has also been interviewed twice by Jim Fetzer on "The Real Deal", on 7 February 2001 and on 10 August 2011.
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ABOUT ME
- JIM FETZER
- McKnight Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Minnesota Duluth; Founder, Scholars for 9/11 Truth; Editor, Assassination Science; Co-Editor, Assassination Research
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26 Anybody lookin'?
27 Ah, it started to get late last night, so
I decided it might be a good idea to put this
stuff to bed.
28 Had some fun, that's for sure.
29 More to come. Watch the night sky
for spacemen.
for spacemen.
30 See you again.
31 Peace.
~H~
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